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Emails from Zeldman About Font Sizes and Readibility
General Comment: Jeffrey Zeldman gave me such a wonderful response to a random question, from someone that he didn't know from, well, Adam, made me a fan for life. Thanks Jeffrey.
Jeffrey's First Response to my less than informed email:
have you tried using the text-size buttons?
http://www.alistapart.com/stories/doctype/
right hand nav bar.
two buttons:
default style - bigger text
link: about the buttons:
http://www.alistapart.com/switcher.html
article: how to build your own style sheet switcher:
http://www.alistapart.com/stories/alternate/
according to CSS2 (and accessibility), all text should be
able to scale if the viewer requires it.
opera allows this.
ie5/mac has text zoom (since march 2000).
mozilla has the same thing.
IE/win still will not allow text to be resized when it is set
in pixels.
through http://www.webstandards.org/ i have been arguing with
them about this for several years, but so far i cannot convince them
to allow text set in pixels to be resized.
so we developed the style switcher to work around that defect
in IE/win.
i use the style switcher at http://www.alistapart.com/ and
http://www.zeldman.com/ and we will use something similar in the
upcoming version of http://www.webstandards.org/.
as to why i use px instead of ems, it's to avoid inheritance
problems and cross-platform problems with ems, which often make
ems-based pages LESS, not more accessible.
( http://www.alistapart.com/stories/fear4/ , an old ALA
article, explains why.)
see also: http://www.zeldman.com/daily/faq.html#pixels
hope this helps!
jeffrey
At 8:29 AM -0400 4/13/02, webmaster@zeldman.com wrote:
>appellation=Scott Johnson
>home_at=http://www.fuzzygroup.com/
>my_thoughts=Hi,
>
>I love your stuff and have for a long time but I have a long
>standing gripe about ALA. Your CSS has disabled the View menu's
>Text Size command in IE. Like a lot of web designers, I run high
>res -- 1600x1200 and when I try to read ALA, it makes my eyes hurt!
>Sure, I can downscale my resolution but that seems silly.
>
>Given that ALA is covering accessibility recently, isn't this part
>of it, shouldn't it be accessible itself?
>
>I totally understand the need to look cool but given that ALA is
>content designed to be read, shouldn't it be easy for people to read
>it?
>
>Thanks
>Scott
>recipient=jeffrey@zeldman.com
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