(Yes, getting old. And I spend many, many hours staring at computer screens, and my eyes get tired.)
At work my computer runs linux, and my browser is Mozilla. When I have trouble making out the text on a web page I just click on ‘view’ and pick a degree of zoom. It works, other than text lines running over areas it shouldn’t.
Here at home I have WinXPHome, and use IE6.0. Under ‘view’ there is a ‘text size’ option that runs in five steps from ‘largest’ to ‘smallest’.
The thing is, I’ve just tried each and every setting on this website (and one other) and there is not the least change in how large the text appears.
What an I doing wrong? If this is universally broken in 6.0, is it fixed in the new version?
If you have a mouse with a wheel, and don’t mind switching to Firefox, you can hold down your Ctrl key and adjust the font size with the wheel. Works fine on this MB.
The reason it won’t work for some web pages is that they restrict how the display can be displayed. Basic HTML text size can be controlled by the person viewing the text, but other text is locked into a specific size.
Well, I just tried control+wheel: it works on the page where the ‘view’ options works, and doesn’t on the other pages. Including this one.
Dang. That must be it. So…why do they do it? Are they out to drive away (getting on towards) Senior Citizens? Or is just overall control-freak-ishness?
I use IE6 and if I click on Tools, Internet Options…, and Accessibility… on the General tab and put a check in the box by “Ignore font sizes specified on Web pages” then I can adjust the font size to suit.
I’ve noticed that sometimes when you load the SD pages, and try to increase the size, only the “Fighting Ignorance”, the Post Replys, and the Online LEDs change size
It’s lazy coding by the web page designer, who probably doesn’t even realize that it’s a problem. There are two ways to specify the size of text. The first, and most obvious, is to specify and exact font size. When they do this, your browser will do exactly as the page says and use that font size. The second way, and the correct one, is to tell the browser to use a size relative to the normal size. For example, they can tell the browser is use a size one bigger than the normal size. This lets you choose what the “normal” size is and have everything display properly and legibly.
Since the thread title is browser generic, Opra fan checking in. In Opera, the + and - characters zoom in and out unless you are in a text entry box. Seems to work fine on all web pages using default settings.
OH MAN, I had the same problem. And I just switched over to Yahoo and the same option is available with their software. MAJOR improvement. Always wondered why some pages were locked out from scroll sizing. Didn’t know you could override it. Kudo’s to Thin Ice for the suggestion.
Well, I tried Firefox a few years ago, and it seemed I was always having to fire up IE instead for some of the pages I visit all the time. So…I just went back to IE as being simpler.
As for Mozilla, uh, I thought it was linux only. Maybe I should look into that.
