[WEB4LIB] Tupperware's Senior Friendly/Shrink Text magnifying glass

[Thomas Dowling]

Phalbe Henriksen wrote:
> Folks,
> 
> Are any of you familiar with the ability to enlarge and shrink text on a web 
> page? Go to www.tupperware.com to see it in the upper right of the main 
> page. This is the first time I've ever seen it. Is it code I could easily 
> use?
> 
>


You'll be better off writing pages that don't need such a kludge.  Give 
your users credit for having their font sizes set they way they want and 
don't mess with that setting.

This is just one of many examples of a page that does nasty things to 
absolute font sizes in an ill-conceived stylesheet, then builds in a 
klunky mechanism to let the user undo what the page shouldn't have done 
in the first place.  I see it done more often with Javascript, but 
Tupperware is using a cookie instead.

Absolute font sizes should be set by the user only.  Whether or not page 
designers should ever tinker with any font size is open for debate, but 
it should only happen within a narrow range of relative measurments.

IMO of course, but it's also a priority 2 WCAG checkpoint for 
accessibility: "Use relative rather than absolute units in markup 
language attribute values and style sheet property values...in CSS, use 
'em' or percentage lengths rather than 'pt' or 'cm'".  Or 'px' for that 
matter.

As Karen Schneider already pointed out, the set of users who call 
themselves "Senior" is not the same as the set that prefers a font size 
larger than what the designer considers average, neither of which is the 
same as the set of users who don't know how to configure their browsers.


-- 
Thomas Dowling
tdowling at ohiolink.edu