kartooner

They say that one of the tell-tale signs that you’re get­ting older is when your eyes just aren’t work­ing like they used to. If you think about, we take our vision for granted and that’s because there’s rarely a moment when some­one will pon­der whether or not their eye­sight will ever fail them. Rather, we just are under the impres­sion that like our health, our eyes will never stray from being in good work­ing con­di­tion and that we’ll never have to resort to glasses or con­tacts, or any­thing that we’d need to depend on to flip through the pages of a book or refrain from trip­ping over a fire hydrant.

Ear­lier this morn­ing I had my first eye appoint­ment and when the nurse informed me that she would be admin­is­ter­ing eye­drops, I just nod­ded and tilted my head back. She then informed me that my eyes would become dialated and that every­thing would be extremely blurry up close. Again, I just nod­ded and was told to return to the wait­ing room to wait for the Doc­tor. A few min­utes later, my eyes became extra sen­si­tive to light and I noticed when I moved my palm close to my face that I couldn’t see any­thing except for a skin-toned blur. Sit­ting there, with poor vision due to the eye­drops, it made me think about var­i­ous con­cerns I’ve often thought about.

In recent years, with the advent of tech­nol­ogy, things are only get­ting smaller in size includ­ing the text we read on our com­puter screens. Unless one were to real­ize this ini­tially while devel­op­ing user inter­faces for those with slightly poorer vision, I believe things will only become worse.

Despite this con­cern, I have seen var­i­ous kiosks and web sites that use larger onscreen text, but some of these are only in effect because of a trend that I call “Big­gie Size”, wherein the designer has decided to use larger text because it’s the “in” thing to do, not nec­es­sar­ily because it might help those with poorer eyesight.

It’s cer­tainly some­thing to take into con­sid­er­a­tion, not only because it looks cool or earn you high fives from your peers but that it might actu­ally be more read­able for those strain­ing their eyes because of smaller text. Yet, where do we begin as design­ers as far as a base­line text size for onscreen read­ing? There’s been sev­eral debates on this topic, many of which never really draw a spe­cific con­clu­sion or answer to a per­fectly leg­i­ble text size for any reader. There’s good rea­son for this, mainly the fact that unless it’s a “one size fits all” t-shirt or base­ball cap, I don’t think there will ever be a golden answer to that question.

Tak­ing that into account, this is why var­i­ous web sites uti­lize em or per­cent­age text scal­ing instead of pixel per­fect (px) siz­ing, allow­ing the reader the abil­ity to increase or decrease the onscreen text. I had a dis­cus­sion the other day with my friend and fel­low 9ruler Peter Flaschner, who men­tioned that the font size on kar­tooner was too small for his tastes, so he sent me a screen­shot where he increased the font size to his liking.

I had no qualms with Peter doing this, espe­cially con­sid­er­ing that I sized every­thing accord­ing to a base­line font size of “small”. Every­thing else is scaled accord­ing to a spe­cific per­cent­age, includ­ing the body text (what you’re read­ing now) which is set at 95% of small. I could set the per­cent­age higher and I’ve con­sid­ered it, but I’m not sure if I’ll receive a com­plaint that the font size is too large. It’s at this point where I’m try­ing to fig­ure out how to meet the needs of those who have good vision and those whose vision isn’t quite what it used to be.