Difficulties of a large font user
Filed Under (Computers, Crap, Geek, Rants and Raves) by Dave on October-1-2008

It’s no secret that I have below average eye sight.  There are things people with bad eye sight do to get by in life.  I enjoy hard cover books rather than paperbacks because the font is larger, I pay more money for good seats to see a show, and I always increase the default font size on my computer to make things easier to read.  This has never really been a problem until recent years when web-design has become more important to sites than usability.  While I understand that asthetics are important to a web site I firmly believe that these looks should not be at the sacrafice of usability.

Because a picture paints a thousand words and I could literally waste thousands trying to explain this to you I’ve chosen to hilight two very popular and very visited websites.

NYTimes home page with large fonts does not present right

NYTimes home page with large fonts does not present right

While this one is bad, the site still remains usable.  It is difficult to use some aspects of the site and on some stories the difficulty becomes even greater, but no section of the site is as bad as,

ESPNs site is almost completely unusable with larger than average fonts

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Comments
James Eagan on October 2nd, 2008 at 5:22 am #

That’s a real shame, because modern web standards make it much easier to design layouts that gracefully handle changes to things like font size changes. It sounds like the web designers are being lazy/shortsighted by making pixel-based assumptions of column widths rather than using character-size based column widths (e.g. use “X em” instead of “Y px” in the CSS).