Hi,

I'm not a designer but I do have a few sites I've made. Recently I noticed my browser text size was set to MEDIUM. I dont remember ever setting this so I assume this is the default text size.

Well, when I increased this to LARGE, boy did my web pages look awful! In some cases, I had text that was superimposed on other text.

(This could be a stupid question but here goes...)

Is this a common problem with sites, or did I (being a novice) just design poorly, in the sense that my site is not equipped to handle different user settings re text?

Is this a common problem with sites, or did I (being a novice) just design poorly, in the sense that my site is not equipped to handle different user settings re text?
Yep - poor design. Text resizing is a regular, expected browser feature. Only one browser , Internet Explorer, allows site authors to break it, and by doing so, all you accomplish is preventing people who need larger text from viewing your site in comfort or at all. The rest simply ignore site author demands that text be a particular size, and it's quite likely IE7 will correct this mistake as well, so it's as critical as ever that sites relying on certain font sizes rethink and reengineer as soon as possible!

The best education you can get in ths regard is probably to take a trip to www.alistapart.com and read through some of their accessibility articles, along with their straight up HTML/CSS articles. Here's a great place to start too - one of the earliest articles on Web accessibility: Web pages aren't printed on paper (http://www.westciv.com/style_master/house/good_oil/not_paper/index.html)

Thanks for the knowledge, the_pm.

Are there any stats re the number of web users that set their text to MEDIUM, LARGE etc?

I know I know, I guess the point is that one should design to accommodate all user preferences, where possible.

Nope, no stats of which I'm aware. I think it's fair to say the majority of Netizens have there fonts set to medium/100%/default. But there are statistics that show that 10-13% of the online population has medically documentable vision-related impairments. Children tend to require larger fonts as well.

I know I know, I guess the point is that one should design to accommodate all user preferences, where possible.
Bingo! ;)

Originally posted by soulstice99
Thanks for the knowledge, the_pm.

Are there any stats re the number of web users that set their text to MEDIUM, LARGE etc?

I know I know, I guess the point is that one should design to accommodate all user preferences, where possible.

Be aware that "small, medium, large" is a Microsoftism, other (http://www.getfirefox.com/) browsers (http://www.operasoftware.com/) allow a linear text zoom to any size the user so desires.

Font-sizes have to be the most poorly conceived notion in HTML+CSS to date, there are many ways to suggest, or even force a font-size on a user, none of them really very helpfull.

http://www.wilk4.com/webdevres/fontcss3.htm

FWIWI ran a poll on another site recently and it revealed 3 from 5 folks had text size set to smaller.:)

Be aware that "small, medium, large" is a Microsoftism, other browsers allow a linear text zoom to any size the user so desires.
Opera is unique in that the user can choose to either magnify everything (keeping the page proportional) or may set a minimum font size, rendering microfonts ineffective. It's a pretty neat way to go about doing things.

FWIWI ran a poll on another site recently and it revealed 3 from 5 folks had text size set to smaller.
There's a lesson to be learned there about messing with the baseline font on your site. Accessibility purists will tell you not only should you not set fixed font sizes, you should not reduce your base font size either. This is the privilege of the end users, and you should leave it in their hands. While I don't get all up-in-arms about it (I reduce base font sizes myself more than I care to admit), it's very difficult to argue against this premise.

Originally posted by the_pm
There's a lesson to be learned there about messing with the baseline font on your site. Accessibility purists will tell you not only should you not set fixed font sizes, you should not reduce your base font size either. This is the privilege of the end users, and you should leave it in their hands. While I don't get all up-in-arms about it (I reduce base font sizes myself more than I care to admit), it's very difficult to argue against this premise.

In a perfect world, this would be true, but because 99.999% of websites don't, and reduce the base font size, it means the users actual base font size is generally much larger than they are used to (or want).

Even if the designers were willing to live with it, and just set thier base font size smaller than the default because thats the text size they prefer (that's the way it's SUPPOSED to work), when they navigate to a 'normal' site other than thier own which does reduce the size they end up with tiny text, so have to increase the text size/zoom, until they go back to thier site where they have to reduce it...

Almost makes you wish browsers would just outright enforce it, remove all font-size specification other than the CSS named selectors (xx-small, x-small, small, medium, large, x-large, xx-large) and ask the user what size they want each to be without any defaults, there would be no way for designers to guess what people had chosen, so they'd have no choice but to go with what the user specified!

Almost makes you wish browsers would just outright enforce it, remove all font-size specification other than the CSS named selectors (xx-small, x-small, small, medium, large, x-large, xx-large) and ask the user what size they want each to be without any defaults, there would be no way for designers to guess what people had chosen, so they'd have no choice but to go with what the user specified!
Interestingly enough, every browser does offer this as an option (it's not enforced, just available). Even more interestingly, IE was a bit of a pioneer in this, if memory serves me. As far back as IE5 and possibly earlier, you could go into the accessibility area and choose to manually override font sizes, opting for browser defaults instead, with your choice of size based on that default instead of individual site base font sizes.

If I ever used IE, I would probably enabled these features. But since I only use it to test sites in production, I don't bother.