August 13, 2008

About a month ago, I was visiting my Dad in Tulsa and I used his pc to check my email and do a little surfing. I didn't know, until I had to adjust my eyes to the huge font size, how bad his eyesight had become. I also didn't realize how terrible most websites look with pumped up font size.

Although people like Jakob Nielsen and Molly Holzschlag have been preaching the value of web usability and standards, sadly most websites don't allow for simple font size adjustment. It sometimes seems enough to use alt tags on images or to worry about how our sites look in IE6, but if most of us realized how terrible our sites look with 16px, 20px, or even larger font size, we would realize it's not enough.

Why should we care? How many older people are actually surfing the web anyway? A lot, actually, and that number is growing. According to Pew Internet and American Live Project, 70% of people aged 50 - 64 are online, and 35% of people over age 65 are online. As the rest of us will eventually be in those age groups, we'll be pumping up the size of our fonts, too...and it will pay off to start thinking about that huge fact sooner rather than later.

My Dad was online before I was, and at 69 years old, still spends a lot of time online. He does his banking and pays his bills online, he reads the news online and chats with his buddies on Google Talk. He shops for coffee and exotic beer...does comparison shopping before buying a new TV or lawnmower. He makes travel plans and searches for recipes, but because he magnifies the fonts, he isn't getting the same user experience that those of us with better vision are getting. He's a great example of how web-savvy older people can be, and of why we need to worry about designing for them, too.

I pulled up several news sites and grew the font size up to anywhere from 16px to 24px, and on a 1440 x 900 monitor, all failed. I measured all of the big players, since they're considered, for the most part, the ideal and are the sites most local organizations want to emulate. I tested in Firefox, IE6, IE7 and Safari. IE6 doesn't provide the same control as the other browsers, so many sites did better there for that reason. In IE7, using the zoom feature, the sites broke in different ways, since the page is actually zoomed instead of the font-size itself increasing. Firefox and Safari use a similar method of increasing the font size, and so the pages broke in the same way. The following shots are based on Firefox.

ABC News

ABC News' main problem was with content overlapping headers. The top story headline and teaser were cut off and the top nav was a bit jumbled. With a few styling changes though, their site could show well with big font.

NY Times

The New York Times did okay up to about 16px to 18px, but beyond that it broke. The bottom half of the page did fairly well, but the main content area at the top skewed all over the place.

CBS News

CBS became unreadable in areas with increased font size. Their top nav broke and the top story was partially hidden by the left navigation. A lot of their special features were broken as well, where it was hard to tell what was going on.

CNN

If you wanted to just look through the top stories on CNN's website with huge font, you would be in luck. The headlines and teasers fared well with an increase in font size, but the top nav didn't. There is overlapping and unreadability in that area, but with an improvement there, CNN would pass the big font test.

MSNBC

MSNBC was the worst offender. It broke after enlarging with just one click, and as the font grew, the more unreadable the site became. Headlines and content were cut off, text overlapped, there is no way to figure out what's going on in the world by looking at that.

I also checked out non-news sites aimed at seniors, and found that even the AARP website broke under the weight of big font, not to the point of being unreadable but to the point that some of the top nav links disappeared. The Ageless Project, which is a wonderful thing, also, sadly, broke.

I don't mean to limit the talk to advanced age, because there are younger people out there who are also visually impaired and who have to use a larger font as well. So it's not just the AARP's of the world that need to worry about providing a good user experience along with larger fonts. News sites in particular, though, should be concerned about the ability to present well under various text-sizing circumstances. Everyone needs to know the latest news, and people of all ages check it at least occasionally. It's only right to make sure they can read the news without fumbling around a broken layout. For the marketers and ad execs out there, it makes financial sense to make sure that everyone can access the site comfortably in order to click on the promotions, ads, etc.

I'm on a new crusade against big font discrimination. Check your site to see if it passes the test and if not, see what you can do to change that. Of course, it would be ridiculous to think that a site can look the same with various font sizes, but it can at least be usable, if not beautiful.

By kim | Permalink | Comments (1)

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