On 6/21/07, David Laakso <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
> Let's see what you've got. Provide a uri to your example.
> Best,
> ~dL

Oh, I'm speaking in a purely academic sense here based on my
experience of layouts that don't really account for text resizing (as
an aside, I am not a designer, I work on an implementation team so I
often don't have very much input into the visual design).

I use em's almost exclusively; but only for the sake of allowing text
to be resized and with the understanding that users changing that size
will likely cause problems with the layout.  The argument of many of
the examples above is that we use 1em as our base size (typically 16pt
font in IE or Firefox by default) and give full control to the user to
change that text size as they see fit while at the same time repeating
over and over that research shows that 12pt is the "preferred" font
size of a majority of Internet users.

With ems, we have to rely on the user setting to know where that base
is--the default is 16pt.  How many users have changed it?  How many
change it on every page they view until they come to the appropriate
size for their needs?  In any of these cases, designers must make some
assumption about what users have done; the majority from what I've
seen tend to leave the default font-size setting as it is; and we
implement our pages based on that assumption--using ems or percentages
to scale the 16pt default to the 12pt "preferred" size.  By using ems,
we do ensure that people are able to make the text larger--but many
materials cited in this discussion say its still bad practice.

Even as a believer in highly accessible design, I have to ask if
there's a point where we've struggled to provide it to a degree that
usability suffers--that is, can we grow so focused on serving "the
long tail" that we forget about the beast its attached to?

Brian
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