/CSS/ Switch site styles with ease

22/10/2008 | Filed under Develop > CSS

Nomensa’s Mark Napthine outlines the benefits of having a style-switcher on your website, and then provides a working example of how to create one

The debate on whether or not to provide text-resize widgets was a hot topic on a number of blogs towards the end of 2007. At one end of the spectrum, some felt they should be forever banished from the internet and that we, as web experts, should concentrate on educating users how to use their technology.

At the other end of the spectrum, it was argued that there are enough situations to justify such a widget and that educating users is too high a mountain to climb.

Let’s look at the plausibility of educating the user. In essence it sounds like the most practical, and ethical choice. Imagine everyone on the planet knowing how to resize text using their browser. Bliss! There are, however, some considerable pitfalls that stop this from being 100 per cent viable.

Firstly, there are a lot of people that require education; an international advertising campaign would be required to even make a dent. Not only do people lack the knowledge of how to resize text, the majority don’t know that it’s even possible, so they don’t look for ‘how to’ information.

There are some users that won’t or can’t be taught. These users include those with learning difficulties or cognitive disabilities, as well as infrequent users and those intimidated by technology.

The browser war we’re witnessing at the moment is gaining momentum. As a result, new browser versions are being released with the inevitable rearrangement of browser options. This may require a lot of help videos and online documentation – who’s to say in years to come we won’t be asking users for the versions of their browser!

It’s also been claimed that a text-resize widget may mislead users into thinking this functionality is only available if such a widget exists on a site. In my personal experience, however, they actually help educate through the sparking of conversation:

“Ooh, it has a lovely text resizing thingy on it!”

“Yes mother, you can do that on all websites these days, would you like me to show you how?”

About the author:

Name Mark Napthine
Site www.nomensa.com
Areas of expertise Accessibility audits, standards compliance
Clients United Nations, Virgin Mobile, Debenhams.
Least-loved household chore Putting my Thundercats duvet cover back on after washing it

Click here to download the support files
Click here to download tutorial PDF

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Comments

norman / 22/10/2008 / 16:36 / http://www.neoaestheticworld.com

i think its an interesting topic that. People are actually intimidated by technology man, i was once like that .
I will take a look at you tutorial..hope i learn something new

cool

viva netmag.uk

n.chovuchovu

Webdesign Agentur / 12/02/2009 / 20:40 / http://www.designbits.de

Very nice tutorial, thank you very much. BTW why don't you provide your tuts as html-files? That would make them even more accessible. Thanks anyway...

eugene / 30/03/2009 / 16:27 / http://addons.32teth.org

easy style switcher for firefox
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/11038

Peter / 12/05/2009 / 15:00

This is a good bit of work.

I've just one comment on it though, it uses php global variables, which are deprecated as of PHP 5.3.0 and REMOVED as of PHP 6.0.0

Would you be able to suggest an alternative way to maintain what style is 'on'?

Cheers