/Access all areas/ Text-sizing widgets
13/04/2007 | Filed under Develop > Access all areas
There’s always a way to improve your site’s user experience. This issue, Nomensa’s Alastair Campbell looks at text-sizing widgets.
Let’s tackle a recurrent accessibility question on the .net forums: whether to use a text-size widget. You know the ones, they have small, medium and large ‘A’ links that change the text size.
As forum member hurricane often points out, this replicates browser functionality, which is best accomplished through the browser if percentages or ems are used for font sizes. This issue is likely to decrease in importance, or at least change because of advances in browsers, so the relative sizing checkpoints could be retired soon. In the meantime, there are useful things to do with that pent-up developer urge to use CSS to its full potential.
In usability testing, I’ve only come across one requirement that creates conflicts between different user groups: colour scheme. People with visual impairments generally want the highest contrast possible, but many people with dyslexia find high-contrast text creates a “crawling” effect. Joe Clark (the renowned accessibility curmudgeon) challenged the web development community at @media 2005 (www.joeclark.org/atmedia/atmedia-NOTES-2.html) to try Zoom layouts (one column with large fonts). We followed this up with some research (presentations.nomensa.com/techshare2005_zoom) with low-vision users that showed a less extreme approach may be just as beneficial.
Technically, users can create their own “user style sheets” that apply to all sites. However, this is much more difficult than changing the text size, and can lead to incompatibilities with some sites. Creating alternate layouts and colour schemes is generally something best done by the site developer.
The main implications from the research and practicalities so far is that it would be better for end users to know how to adjust text size in their browser, but colour scheme and layout changes are best accomplished by web developers (at least for now).
If you want to help people learn about their technology, the BBC’s My Web My Way site is excellent. It was set up with this in mind and I would recommend linking to it: www.bbc.co.uk/accessibility.
For a technical implementation, try Invasion of the Body Switchers by Andy Clarke and James Edwards (www.brothercake.com/site/resources/scripts/iotbs/).
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