Font Sizes vs. Accessibility, and Standards Compliance

If your fonts appear too small or too large on other pages of this site, that is because we designed them to be adjustable by you (and your browser, such as Internet Explorer, Firefox or Safari). To change the setting:

• Click your View menu, then one of the following, depending on your browser:
  • click on "Text Size", then "Medium" (Internet Explorer)
  • or click on "Text Size", then "Normal" (Firefox)
  • or click on "Make Text Normal Size" (Safari)

Of course, once you have set the text size to the "median" setting as suggested in the instructions, you could prefer to change it to larger or smaller from that reference point. This paragraph and the ones below respond to your changes to the font size, while the previous instructions were not (so that you could follow them easily, if your browser were set too far off).

Why make fonts adjustable?

Because not everyone has the same needs, desires and hardware, standards were developed so that everyone can enjoy the internet, per their needs, desires and hardware.

Needs include those with poor vision or any challenge to visibility. So those people may need much larger fonts than others. Or someone may simply desire that their fonts be smaller so that they could see more of the page at once. Hardware issues include the physical size of the monitor as well as the number of "pixels" it is set to display (called "resolution"). Lower resolution makes things look larger on the same monitor, at the expense of fewer objects displayed at once. This is also a setting may vary for each computer.

Websites have no control over all these variables, so they should be designed to allow the user to adjust the site's fonts per their preferences without "breaking".

But other sites looked fine without these adjustments.

In the past, websites were often designed to force the size of fonts, not allowing the user to change them. This was fine for many users, but it was disrespectful of those who needed or wanted the display to be different. So standards were developed to support changing the sizes. And finally it has become the norm to use them, design websites complying to those standards.

We designed this site to allow you to view it ... your way!