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Microsoft MVP

 

Increasing Text-Size

 
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All Forums >> Web Development >> Accessibility >> Increasing Text-Size
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Nicole

 

Posts: 2830
Joined: 9/15/2004
From: Nambucca / Kempsey, Australia
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Increasing Text-Size - 11/18/2005 4:31:14   
I guess I'm really not posing any questions, nor am I pointing out anything great, but surely the ability for text to be increased is the most basic of accessibility features, possibly alongside alt attribures for images.

I've been reviewing a lot of sites for a report recently and have noticed that "mostly" text can be increased. I think this is a pretty common finding as most sites generally don't go to the trouble of restricting the ability of viewers to resize text on purpose. Whether it remains readable when its resized is another thing entirely though.

One thing I've realised though, is that while text-size may be increased on many sites, those of them that use drop down menus either don't allow text-resizing within those menus, or if they do, the drop-down menu often becomes unreadable at the first increase in text-size.

Now I often increase text-size to unreasonable extremes when trying to prove to myself that a site is poorly designed, and about a year ago I launched into a 700 page site redesign for a client, a site i'm not at all happy with now and intend to go in and correct the obvious errors as soon as I can, now that I know so much more about web design and accessibility. But just now I decided to resize the text to extremes on this site.

The site uses the much maligned (in my opinion) Webstyle 4 drop-down menus, and to my surprise that menu, even at 800 x 600 screen resolution held it's proportion and readability upon resizing text not once, not twice, but three times in Firefox on my monitor, something I truly didn't expect.

So, I'm interested if others test text resizing when designing a site, at what level of increasing text-size you consider enough to be enough, surely people won't need to increase the text size that much, they'd be using 800 x 600 anyway, and those that use or have used accessible drop-down menus, to what level of increasing text-size do they hold their shape?

Nicole

p.s. that menu on that site was created with no knowledge of accessibility issues, the fact that it may work on my monitor after so much text-size increasing was a fluke.

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womble

 

Posts: 5506
Joined: 3/14/2005
From: Living on the edge
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RE: Increasing Text-Size - 11/18/2005 5:04:22   
I always test for text resizing. The major redesign I've just done, I had a hell of a job getting the page layout to not break at large text sizes, although I wasn't using a drop-drop menu but a tabbed two level menu that wrapped at larger sizes making it unreadable. I ended up having to increase the page width to something like 1300px to stop it breaking the page completely - not an ideal solution because of course that caused a huge amount of horizontal scroll, which in itself of course can cause accessibility problems.

With mine I increase 4 times (on FF) so it looks around the equivalent of 30pt printed text if that makes sense. For that site I used a stylesheet switcher with the extra large font size set at x-large, with <h1> tags at 180px (I had to used fixed sizing for the headings otherwise it completely broke the layout).

I think as far as text sizing's concerned, there does come a point where increasing it beyond a certain level is counter-productive because of the layout, readability and usability issues it creates, and in all probably anyone who needed extra huge sized text would be using magnification or screen-reading software anyway. Quite what that level is though, I'm not sure. :)

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jaybee

 

Posts: 14140
Joined: 10/7/2003
From: Berkshire, UK
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RE: Increasing Text-Size - 11/18/2005 7:18:18   
quote:

anyone who needed extra huge sized text would be using magnification or screen-reading software anyway.


That's my assumption as well. I usually allow a reasonable resize but most of my menus will break eventually (a couple sooner rather than later but heck I was still learning)

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Now where did I put that Doctype?

(in reply to womble)
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