SIZE Matters!

One of my continuing gripes about the Internet is short-sighted (if you’ll pardon the deliberate pun) web designers. No, I’m not talking about designers who leave out crucial information. That’s another matter entirely. I’m talking about web designers—probably in their 20s and with perfect vision—who insist upon essentially chiseling their font size selections into stone.

For a case in point, visit http://www.woot.com/, using MS Internet Explorer. Now, from the menu, choose View – Text Size – Smallest. Now, choose View – Text Size – Largest, and keep your eyes on the text as you do it. See any change?

Tip: In most Windows applications, if you have a wheel mouse, you can adjust the text size by holding down the Ctrl key and scrolling the wheel.

The only change I see is in the size of the bullets in the list of bulleted features. The text, however, remains rigidly locked at a size my half-century-plus eyes can’t read without magnifying glasses.

Now, visit http://www.dol.gov/ (the U.S. Department of Labor) web site, and try the same exercise. Unless they’ve joined the lock-down-font-size madness between when I write this and when you read this, you will indeed see a difference, as shown below:

“Why is this?” you might ask. One reason is that Woot’s young web programmers probably don’t yet need reading glasses. The technical reason, however, is that one designer cares more about locking their design into a rigid format than they care about whether anybody can actually read it. This usually is done by using an evil tool known as cascading style sheets (css).

But, not always. At the extreme end of the spectrum are web designers who actually use graphics rather than text to present their text. This not only makes such web pages extremely inflexible (unless you have a zooming browser such as Netscape or FireFox), but it also makes it very unlikely anyone will ever find that site by Googling any of that text that’s locked into a graphic.

A Sometimes Work-Around

Well, I’m not in the habit of complaining unless there’s something I can do about it. This time is no different. I have a plan: My plan is to wait 30 years until all those programmers are in their 50s. Then they’ll see!

No, wait. That doesn’t help anyone now.

Okay, in the meantime, there’s a work-around that often works well, and usually at least works, but doesn’t always provide relief. Still, it will help many.

From MS Internet Explorer’s menu, choose Tools – Internet Options – Accessibility.

Note the three upper formatting options:

·        Ignore colors specified on Web pages

·        Ignore font styles specified on Web pages

·        Ignore font sizes specified on Web pages

Quick relief usually can be had by telling IE to ignore font sizes. With this option selected, Woot suddenly becomes more, well, accessible:

This solution isn’t perfect, however. That’s because a number of web sites, Woot included, also set a fixed line height. The result is that sometimes characters get clipped at the tops and/or bottoms. Sometimes text is displayed on top of other text. When that happens, you can try decreasing the text size. Or, you can try yelling out your window “I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take it anymore!”

While my solution isn’t perfect, it does help, and it’s easier on the vocal chords and neighbors. Now, browsing the internet will be a bit more tolerable while I’m waiting for all those young whippersnapper programmers with perfect eyesight to catch up with me. Why, in another 30 years, they’ll be the same age I am. Right?