Web Development

An in house development team is building a website and we were wondering what from a Web Accessibility standpoint is a best practice when it comes to resizing text. Most browsers have a menu item to resize text, but not all users may know it is there or may have difficulty reaching it. Some websites resort to offering resizing text via screen buttons. These buttons would need to be programmed.

There are pros and cons to each approach, but is there a best practice for text resizing?

The best practice is the one that works best with your target group.

See the Web Accessibility Initiative and Web Content Accessibility Guidelines on hints on what that practice might be. Based on that serve the site or an emulation to those who might need it, and see how well it's handled.

Thank you for your answer. I always thought that websites should be available and accessible to all, regardless of what the site owner thinks his target group is. ONe of your links (Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) - home page) actually does have a section text resizing and has only a very general guideline: "Using server-side scripts to resize images of text."

I agree with you that sites should be accessible to all. What I mean with target group is not a group of people with a similar impairing condition, but similar interests. Eg. a group of software engineers will probably search for the "re-size text" option differently than a group of linguists. And with seniors it should be as easy as possible to find it, and be non-obtrusive otherwise.

Mind tho, this is coming from someone who "designs" web-pages as black-on-white, default font & size, should be readable in lynx or w3m

Ok, thanks for the pointers.

It makes sense to design web sites to use the viewer's default font and size. That's what they prefer; who are we to tell them otherwise?

That does not mean that a page need be dull and visually uninteresting. Mostly it means not specifying everything.

Correct, and it makes for easier maintenance too.