Comments on: Font sizes and accessibility http://coffeepowered.co.uk/2008/11/font-sizes-and-accessibility/ The online ramblings of Paul Stanton Tue, 09 Aug 2011 18:21:48 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.1 By: Robert O'Rourke http://coffeepowered.co.uk/2008/11/font-sizes-and-accessibility/comment-page-1/#comment-3 Robert O'Rourke Tue, 18 Nov 2008 12:41:50 +0000 http://coffeepowered.co.uk/blog/?p=12#comment-3 Nice article Paul. I agree with your conclusion however there is a problem in that many users who may benefit from being able to resize text or edit colours etc... simply don't know how or even that they can so you're right, the text size isn't the cause of inaccessibility. In my opinion it's the browser's fault for not making it clear that it can be resized. Really I'm just trying to pass the buck here but the onus should be on the browser vendors to make the accessibility features they already offer more obvious to less technical people. IE7 was the first browser to add the zooming feature as part of the GUI (bottom bar on the right) which I think is one of the best ideas they've ever had. Hopefully Mozilla, Opera and Safari etc... will follow suit (as much as it may pain them). Nice article Paul. I agree with your conclusion however there is a problem in that many users who may benefit from being able to resize text or edit colours etc… simply don’t know how or even that they can so you’re right, the text size isn’t the cause of inaccessibility. In my opinion it’s the browser’s fault for not making it clear that it can be resized.

Really I’m just trying to pass the buck here but the onus should be on the browser vendors to make the accessibility features they already offer more obvious to less technical people. IE7 was the first browser to add the zooming feature as part of the GUI (bottom bar on the right) which I think is one of the best ideas they’ve ever had. Hopefully Mozilla, Opera and Safari etc… will follow suit (as much as it may pain them).

]]> By: Jonny Haynes http://coffeepowered.co.uk/2008/11/font-sizes-and-accessibility/comment-page-1/#comment-2 Jonny Haynes Tue, 18 Nov 2008 11:51:34 +0000 http://coffeepowered.co.uk/blog/?p=12#comment-2 I've never thought of font size being an issue as a user can resize the font themselves (as you've mentioned above). The only thing that I would say is that obviously you've got to design sites in such a way as to allow the user to increase there font sizes without breaking the design of the page. Something similar to the way<a href="http://simplebits.com/" rel="nofollow">Dan Cederholm</a> builds sites. I’ve never thought of font size being an issue as a user can resize the font themselves (as you’ve mentioned above).

The only thing that I would say is that obviously you’ve got to design sites in such a way as to allow the user to increase there font sizes without breaking the design of the page. Something similar to the wayDan Cederholm builds sites.

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