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

[Karen Coyle]

We had a real problem with "resized pages" when we brought up the Aleph
version of MELVYL a while back. It turns out that IE increases the size
of the font, leaving the size of images and space between things alone.
Netscape/Mozilla increases the size of the whole page. What was
happening under Netscape/Mozilla was that the whole page was not showing
on the screen because of the increased size, and since the results box
was set to the right, people weren't seeing any results returned. (I
can't describe this well, but try it out with the two browser types and
it will make sense.) That could be a reason to include an "increase text
size" function on a page rather than rely on browsers.

kc

kc

On Mon, 2005-01-03 at 08:42, K.G. Schneider wrote:

> 
> I'm not disagreeing with any of you on the value of relative units of size
> (said she who spent part of the holiday testing stylesheets that did just
> that). What I am wondering is, assuming if you are using relative units, it
> is bad or wrong (or simply impossible) to implement the text-sizing tool
> anyway, on the assumption that people are going to use it because the
> instructions are on the page, and not hidden in pull-down menus in the
> browser. Most of us aren't perched on our users' shoulders, and "showing
> them once" is not gonna happen. That doesn't answer the question of how you
> teach someone to resize EVERY page, but it does make it possible for users
> to view YOUR page more easily. Even if your page is sized for a reasonably
> mature audience, plenty of people may want to blow it up anyway. 
> 
> Do we have data available that most or even many users do know how to resize
> their pages? Particularly "seniors," as those Tupperware folk put it? 
> 
> Karen G. Schneider
> kgs at bluehighways.com
> 
> 
-- 
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Karen Coyle
Digital Library Specialist
http://www.kcoyle.net
Ph: 510-540-7596 Fax: 510-848-3913
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