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Re: Opera font sizes - 1px larger?

Posted: Mon Aug 17, 2009 4:26 am
by matthijs
Interesting discussion. I used to favor non-pixel font-sizes. However, now that almost all browsers support some form of zoom and/or text-resizing, I tend to use pixels again.

The statement
onion2k wrote:You shouldn't be using pixel sizes for fonts anyway. They stop people resizing the font to what they want, which breaks all sorts of accessibility guidelines (and laws in some countries).
is not true. It should be "stop some people in some situations resizing the font".

In this discussion it's important to make a few distinctions I think:
- public (government and semi-government) sites versus private sites. If a government site has to be used by citizens to fill in some forms, everything (or at least a lot) has to be done to make those as accessible as possible. Although I do think that it's not pure black/white. Some legislation forcing companies to adapt their products/services to a certain extent to accommodate accessibility is fine I think. However, it will always be a subjective judgment how far one has to go. Forcing a big supermarket to have a parking sport for wheelchair users close to the entrance is fine maybe. But there is a limit to what you can do.

- accessibility versus usability
If I set my website text to 13px font-size, does that make my site inaccessible? I don't think so. Unusable? Maybe to some people with bad sight. But then, the barrier to do something about it (hitting CTRL+, switching browsers, getting glasses, using a different monitor resolution, etc etc) is incredibly low.