Coding like it's 2009
Back in 1999, when IE ruled the world and most people still used tables for layout, pixel-sized text was one of the web’s great evils. IE, you see, couldn’t resize text sized in pixels – which meant huge numbers of sites were inaccessible to almost anyone with less-than-perfect vision. Web developers who cared about accessibility (or usability) learned instead to size text in ems—a unit relative to the browser’s default text size.
A decade on, we have lots of new browsers, all of them capable of using page zoom, resizing not only pixel-sized text, but images too. So, Cameron Moll suggests in Coding like it’s 1999, we can safely go back to sizing text in pixels – because now anyone who wants can resize it.
What does all this mean? It means px can again be considered a viable value for font-size.
- Cameron Moll
Sorry Cameron, but for people who care about accessibility, that’s just plain wrong.
Approximately ~17% worldwide still use IE6 (NetApplications, May 2009). Much as we might want IE6 to die, that’s hardly an insignificant market share. Even allowing for the drop in IE6 usage at weekends, quite a lot of people would be potentially disadvantaged. (As an aside, IE7 and 8 still don’t scale pixel-sized text. We don’t know how many IE7 or 8 users prefer text scaling to page zoom, but we do know that if they’re on a pixel-sized site their preferred type of scaling won’t work.)
Looking deeper, em-sized text isn’t just scaleable – it does a better job of respecting users preferences.
- It’s based on the browsers default text settings, which are set to ensure basic readability.
- If your em values are reasonable, most readers won’t be obliged to adjust text scale.
- It makes a better solution available to users who need larger text—they can increase the browser’s default text size.
- For users who aren’t tech-savvy enough to do that, it ensures text is always resizeable.
The bottom line, though, is that as professionals, we shouldn’t force users to adopt a technical solution to a problem that we can easily solve for them. Yes, working with ems is a little more difficult, but as Nate Koechley put it recently, “It’s OK for us to suffer a little bit to give the user a better experience; that’s what we’re here for.” The fact that a technical solution exists doesn’t relieve us of responsibility to get things right in the first place and stop the problem ever happening.
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