RE: Alternative Style Sheets

Liam R E Quin [mailto:liam@w3.org] wrote at Thursday, October 18, 2012 12:25 PM
> To: Antony Kennedy
> Cc: www-style@gtalbot.org; Markus Ernst; Dirk Schulze; W3C www-style
> mailing list
> Subject: Re: Alternative Style Sheets
> 
> On Thu, 2012-10-18 at 19:37 +0100, Antony Kennedy wrote:
> > > For people with disabilities or special needs, then an user
> > > stylesheet is necessary.
> >
> > But should we really expect all users to write their own stylesheets?
> > I agree, they should have the option. But I'd rather offer them a good
> > solution where I still have a degree of control.
> 
> +1
> 
> 
> A good solution might be for the user agent to have some preferences, .
> Minimum and maximum hue and value contrast (e.g., adjust these two slider
> controls until the preview is comfortable for you to read) . Minimum,
> maximum and preferred font size, font and line spacing . Maximum preferred
> text line length
> 
> Most browsers have at least a default font choice, although there's not
> usually any control over line spacing, unfortunate since that and line
> length are the two most significant factors in readability after you've
> reached the "more or less comfortable" zone with font and colour.

This sounds like a browser bug or at least a feature request.  Adjusting 
font size to greater than the line height would ideally increase the line 
height to at least the new font size.

The other issue, however, is that use of absolute positioning on a page 
frequently results in some text overprinting or obscuring other text or 
in text clipping if text size in the browser is greater than what the 
website was designed to accommodate.  

> Setting this sort of preference in CSS is unreasonably difficult for most
> people - it's the wrong level of abstraction. Which is why most browsers
> have preferences instead.

Hope this helps,
Charles Belov
SFMTA Webmaster

Received on Monday, 22 October 2012 22:08:01 UTC