Increased font size on Tropospherical site scheme

[momijizukamori]

Title:
Increased font size on Tropospherical site scheme

Area:
Site scheme (Tropospherical)

Summary:
At the moment, Tropo shows entry and comment text at 75% of browser default. This winds up being a bit on the small side, compared to other similar websites, which leads to squinting and headaches after lots of site-schemed page reading for people who don't usually experience these problems, particularly as Tropo Red is the 'default' people who are new to the site see. Increasing this a bit (I would suggest 0.85em) would increase readability

Description:
This came about as a result of some of the LJ-migration recently, where a number of people who are not usually photosensitive mentioned getting headaches after browsing on both Tropo Red and Tropo Purple for a while. I did some poking about in CSS, and discovered that the 0.75em size scales text down to a bit smaller than the size I usually see on blogs or LJ's old site schemes. It's basically in that range of 'just enough change to cause problems, not enough change to be immediately noticeable'.

I wrote a quick Stylish script to increase font size to 0.82em (along with a slightly smaller line height, but I think it's the font-size that's the core issue) and got feedback that yes, it was a lot more readable that way. 0.82em is kind of weird, and I'd probably just say round up 0.85em to be neat about it.

The problem with writing it as a Stylish script, though, is that any time someone is not at their home computer, it's back to site default (and I do realize that there are other site schemes, but most people I've talked to don't like the horizontal navigation of Celerity and find black-background even harder to read). Increasing the font-size just a bit should be a fairly easy fix (unless it's not in CSS styling? I haven't had a chance to poke through files), and it's not a big enough change to negatively affect users who didn't have the problem with the smaller font size while helping people who do.

Poll #9005 Increased font size on Tropospherical site scheme

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 81

View Respondents

This suggestion:

View Answers

Should be implemented as-is.
33 (40.7%)

Should be implemented with changes. (please comment)
23 (28.4%)

Shouldn't be implemented.
8 (9.9%)

(I have no opinion)
17 (21.0%)

(Other: please comment)
0 (0.0%)

Comments

[rainfall]

No, I'm not. I know that people with accessibility problems have more severe problems than people with small font preferences. But I do like the idea of going for .85em, if that makes everybody happy, rather than swinging all the way over to 1em.

But I only say that because the OP said .82 was enough to solve the problems they'd encountered, not because I'm picking the number arbitrarily. You know? I didn't want to overcorrect the problem. And I didn't finish reading your response, so I didn't see that that wasn't enough for you. For that, I apologize.

But I have to say: There are also browser settings you can tweak to make sure you NEVER have to mess with font sizes again: in Firefox, for example, go to Tools-->Options-->Content-->Fonts & Colors-->Advanced.

There, you can set 16px as your minimum font size, and never have to swap around font sizes again.

[momijizukamori]

Doing this doesn't preserve scaling, properly, however. If someone uses < small > on text, it's supposed to be smaller than the 'regular' text. But if regular < min, then the 'small' text shows at the same size as the regular - they both get forced to min. Drives me crazy, at least, and is the main reason I disabled min font size on my browser.

[at_heart]

:( I'm sorry to hear that.

[momijizukamori]

Well, my solution was just to use zoom on pages instead as necessary and increase my browser default a few points *g* but being an RPer, I do like the delineation different font sizes give, personally!

[arethinn]

the 'small' text shows at the same size as the regular - they both get forced to min.

For me this is a feature, not a bug. I like having supposedly "smaller" text be the same size, and easier to read, even if it may defeat someone's idea of how their website ought to look.

[marahmarie]

The use of small actually has tons of relevance on DW/LJ/etc because users of these sites tend to use it as a way to visually highlight an addendum to their thoughts without writing out the word "addendum" or using a highlight in their inline HTML styling or CSS. For this reason the scaling should be preserved, but you can't have it with a min font size set in your browser - so you lose a lot of context. If you know when you see it that a smaller font size is used in-entry to give a "special" or "different" meaning to a chunk of text, but you can no longer see that text is in a smaller font size, you've lost the context altogether.

Which is why I've coded small in my CSS to show up as red as well as small - I believe in defeating limiting font-sizing when I can.

[arethinn]

I'm aware that small text is often used for footnote-asides and there can be some loss of this meaning, but I think the needs of the comfort of my eyes takes precedence. I should be able to determine the looks of my own browsing experience to my own taste and needs, thanks.

[marahmarie]

Sorry, I see now that I worded that poorly. What I meant was that there should be some way for the browser to keep the scaling intact, not that you should preserve it on your end. Unfortunately there's no way to keep min font size at 1em and have a smaller font scale correctly, which was why I mentioned I tend to code the smaller font to be red (and also to display in italics) to put the "different" look back in there for those who set a min font in their browsers (and I wish more people who code CSS would do things like that to make the web more readable all-around).