ShortcutGuide Blog

The site’s really useful. Ironic, though, that a site that supports an essential accessibility function doesn’t support increasing the text size very well. I like to increase it a fair amount at times, depending on how far I want to be from the monitor, the environment I am working in, and how my eyes are that day.

Using Safari 3.1, I start at minimum size. Looks very nice, although I can only read it if I am 6″ from monitor. At 4th increment, line return outdents noticeably–I can read it now at a comfortable distance, but it’s more confusing. In a standard list, the line return would be flush left or be indented, not outdented for optimal scanning. Also, text size relative to line length is breaking usability guidelines.

At 8x text size increase, a horizontal scroll bar appears, as the pane width can no longer accommodate table width.

While it’s possible for the user to handle this visually and interactively, usability has decreased.

It would be nice to see the left pane increase with text size. Actually, better yet, a more standard approach would be to search in upper left pane, with dynamically generated expanding left menu and results in right pane (the larger pane.)

By layout fails to accommodate text size increase on May 4, 2008