Let me assure you that I really did change my template yesterday. I tweaked all the font sizes I've had since day 1, converting them from rigid points to flexible ems. Point size is the same on every machine, whereas ems vary according to what you've set as normal. I was deliberately losing control over exactly what size text you see, in the interests of global accessibility. And I was definitely expecting widespread random chaos, as several of you complained that things just didn't look right any more. That doesn't appear to be what happened.
It seems that, for most of you, your normal is the same as my normal. We haven't tweaked our browser font size from its default setting, so we all see the same thing. That's good. But for a few people, especially those with dodgy eyesight, they'd reset normal to be rather bigger that that. On their browsers the body text on my blog suddenly went giant sized yesterday - a really quite significant shift which made my blog look very odd. Very odd indeed.
And it's not just personal preference. Not all browsers and operating systems work the same way. I checked a variety of combinations using the "comparison" weblink I offered you yesterday, and was surprised to see how different they all now look. In some the text was huge, in some the text was normal and in others the text was tiny. Not good.
Allowing flexibility appears to have messed things up for more people than it helped. I can't live with that. I don't want some visitors seeing giant largeprint and others seeing microscopic script, because that's not how this blog is meant to be. I'm a control freak and I like everyone to see my blog "properly". So I've switched all my text sizes back to how they used to be, back to normal. No ems, just rigid inflexible points. And I'm sorry if this goes against the spirit of accessibility legislation or DDA compliance, but that's how it's going to be.
The power to tweak how the fonts on a webpage look is already in your hands. If you have Firefox then try pressing [Control][+] or [Control][-] a few times until you like what you see. If you have Internet Explorer then a more permanent tweak is buried in the Internet Options menu somewhere. I've decided I'm not doing it for you. I'm going to concentrate on the text, not the text size, because it's the content that matters.
It seems that, for most of you, your normal is the same as my normal. We haven't tweaked our browser font size from its default setting, so we all see the same thing. That's good. But for a few people, especially those with dodgy eyesight, they'd reset normal to be rather bigger that that. On their browsers the body text on my blog suddenly went giant sized yesterday - a really quite significant shift which made my blog look very odd. Very odd indeed.
