Size matters
Why offer your website users the possibility to increase font?
The obvious answer is: not everyone has the same eyesight. For some people, what’s big for you, is small for them. Accessibility is a very important issue, and sometimes the answer is much easier than rethinking layouts or changing menu options. Some web designers say, why bother? since there are zooming features in practically all modern browsers now. What they forget is that not everyone spends their days updating browsing software, and not everyone ever bothers investigating their browsers’ hidden features such as zooming.
Some statistics: The World Health Organization estimates 161 million people worldwide have a visual impairment. Of these, 37 million are blind and 124 million have low vision (World Health Organization, 2000).
An estimated 7.9 million persons age 15 and older (3.5%) have difficulty seeing words and letters in ordinary newspaper print, even when wearing glasses or contact lenses (Steinmetz).
Approximately 19 million persons age 18 and older (8.8%) report having any trouble seeing even when wearing glasses or contact lenses (Lethbridge-Cejku, Rose, and Vickerie).
One in six Americans (17%), 45 years of age or older, representing 16.5 million middle-aged and older adults, report some form of vision impairment even when wearing glasses or contact lenses (The Lighthouse Inc.)
These numbers speak for themselves. It’s not without a valid reason that the UK government mentions, in the official guidelines for all government websites:
Use only clear, commonly used fonts. Avoid the use of small text. Users should have the ability to scale fonts.
Even now, with all the technological advancement, legibility problems regularly end up “winning” the top rankings in the top ten web-design mistakes.
So the real question is, “Do you want everyone to be able to view your website?”
If you make your websites in Dreamweaver, the simplest and quickest way to make your website totally legible by everyone is by using Font Magnify, a handy extension created by TDE which can be downloaded here. A simple set of A+, A- buttons, which can be easily interpreted by everyone, can be added anywhere on your pages with a single click. All you need to do is establish which content you want to be scalable. This is handy, because as Peter Schaffer notices on DreamweaverExtensions.org, “Limiting the size manipulation to a certain area (the extension also lets you set a maximum and minimum size range) means nearby design elements can retain their look while the visitor adjusts their own browsing experience.”
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