Postby japanesepod1018069 » September 23rd, 2010 3:30 am
I have to agree with the font size problem. Because the website developers have put a pixel-based font size specification in many of their style sheets, they have destroyed the end-user's ability to adjust their browsers so that the sites are usable to them. I use the latest Firefox, for example, so that's what I will discuss below.
For example, in this box I'm typing in now, there are TWO style sheets that apply, both forcing the font size to eleven pixels. These are subSilver.css, line 170 or so, and style.css, line 42 or so. BOTH of these have to be disabled in order for user font settings to be possible.
How small is eleven pixels? The capital 'T' at the beginning of this sentence is, when I hold a ruler up to my screen and measure it, it only two millimeters tall. Yes, two millimeters. A lower-case 'o' is barely one mm. And now, just imagine trying to read Kanji. You can't. For a newbie who is just learning kana and kanji to squint at unreadable text is not just frustrating, it's harmful.
And, to add insult to injury, going in to Firefox's font settings and configuring it so that user preferences are supposed to override website settings don't work on JPod. It works on many other (well-designed) sites, but not here. Perhaps the JPod web designers are very proud that they have found a way to make their site look exactly the way they want it... on their screens, on their browsers, on their operating systems. But, they need to remember that they are not designing for themselves... they are designing for the rest of us, everyone who pays to use the site. If the site's designers are not concerned with the usability of the site, then perhaps you should ask them to reimburse you for every user who decides they just don't want to deal with trying to adjust things so that the site is comfortable for them to use and ends their subscription.
I know the answer has come back "well, you can just zoom." And, as the original poster said, using the browser's "zoom" feature is not really a solution, because you are either "zooming" the entire site, which means page elements shoot off the right side of the screen and images get pixelated and ugly, or if you zoom text only, button labels and other elements become unreadable because they were not (correctly) designed to flow with the text but demand an inflexible, an in many cases unusable, text pixel size. If the web designers are offended at the thought of what would happen if they gave up fixed pixel text size and designed the site to flow per the user's settings, they should be even more horrifed at the results of "zoom" applied to the current CSSs that were not designed to flow with different text sizes.
Anyhow, that is my two cents. Perhaps it will be ignored as these inputs have been in the past, but perhaps one day someone will reconsider "font-size: 11px;"
ありがとうございます
