Offering text in different sizes

Question

This is a general question of sorts, but do you think that it's important to offer text resizing tools on a website, which in essense only effect text as it seems that most browsers offer text resising or more commonly zooming?

Answer 1

Text resizing is a requirement to get the stamp of accessibility.

i.e. http://www.w3.org/WAI/

Some government sponsored websites are required for this stamp.

Answer 2

You can use JQuery :

$(function() {
    $('a').click(function() {
        var os = $('p').css('font-size');
        var num = parseFloat(os);
        var uom = os.slice(-2);

        if (this.id == 'larger') {
            $('p').css('font-size', num * 1.4 + uom);
        } else
            $('p').css('font-size', num / 1.4 + uom);
    })

})

HTML :

 <a href="#" id="larger">Larger</a>
 <br/>
 <a href="#" id="smaller">Smaller</a>
 <p>Your Text</p>

Answer 3

I think it depends on who your audience is. I would guess that the vast majority of computer users have absolutely no idea that their browser can zoom pages, let alone how to do it.

This kind of functionality seems to be quite popular with newspapers (e.g. The Guardian), which obviously are used by a wide cross-section of web users. If your website is targeted at more technical people, or is really graphics-heavy, this feature might not be worthwhile.

Answer 4

Your text should be resizable, i.e. the layout should stand some really BIG FONT SIZES. But you don’t need to offer an extra tool to reinvent native browser functions. There are good reasons against such options.

If you care about accessibility, don’t create the need for resizing. Use the user’s font size for body text, set dimensions in em and test the layout with big minimal font size preferences (20px and above).