Text Scalability
One particular CSS accessibility problem has to do with text resizing. It's tempting to choose a smaller font size for your work to fit more information on the screen at once. We all know how little space we're given to work with onscreen anyway, so there's a justified rationale for going smaller.The problem is that many people just can't read text below a certain size. For some, 12-pixel-high text is unreadable, and in extreme cases even 24 pixels is too small. Of course, no one is going to start designing with 24-pixel-high body copy on today's low-resolution monitors, so there has to be a compromise somewhere.Chapter 5 covers some entirely different problems that might be encountered when using em or % units.Even if text is scalable in all browsers, though, there's something else to consider: The design must also allow for scaling (FIGURE 15). That sounds easy, but if you blend fixed-size elements (like a 20px-high background image) with elements that are variable (like text that the viewer has resized from 14px to 24px), you'll quickly notice that a design that relies on fixed sizing can break down very quickly when the font is different from what the designer expected. Most Zen Garden designs have been tested for this condition and can be resized quite a bit larger than their default.
Figure 15. Text is scalable, even if images and proportions aren't.
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