See you in 1984

Tutorials have been written on how to implement a text resizer and even on how to detect when text has been resized and that is great. All companies that target older people should give the user the ability to resize the text. Yet, what good is the text resizer if the user cannot see it?

If the user is savvy enough they can use "Ctrl +" to resize the text. Some people do not know that shortcut. So the first thing they may do is look for one on the site. Now if the original font size is 12px the user can not see fonts at 12px, then your "Increase font size" message displayed at 12px will not be easy for them to see. Try increasing the font size of the message to a reasonable size where the user with vision troubles will see it.

Now once the user has the ability to see the text resizer half of the battle is won. Now they are going to go back and forth between what's too large and what is large enough, until they find a comfortable font size for them. The problem is though I question allowing them to be able to resize the text back down to the original font. Why? They will not be able to read it. So the font size should only be sizes that are larger than the original font size.

If you have an existing site maybe you can find out what size the users are resizing the text to for consideration when redesigning. Then use that data to make your design, at a minimum, flexible to the 2–3 most popular font sizes that are larger than the original font size.

Any thoughts?

A List Apart’s Survey (for people who make websites) is back and it’s better than ever. It takes less than 5 mins and the results will be available in just a few weeks.

Firefox is just great and IE isn't. As a matter its so great that I’m doing my part to get the word out about Firefox.

What am I doing, you ask? Well every time I travel out of town, I go to the business center of the hotel that we are staying in and I attempt to install firefox on at least one of the pcs. Most hotels pc do not let you install anything. When I luck up and am able to install Firefox I usually install the googleweb developer toolbar and sometimes I make it the default browser. The last step is probably not a good one but hey, people should be aware of their options.

I’m such a rebel, NOT!