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Readability

I’ve added a stylesheet specifically for people who have eyesight problems. Try it here. Although most browsers will let you increase text size, it’s hard to design layouts that cope well with very large text. This style is very simple, perhaps overly so, but it should be readable by everyone except for a few with very unusual colour sensitivities.

I myself have some problems with my eyes, so I’m conscious of the need to cater for those with less than perfect vision. The trend in site design is to use larger, clearer type, but there are still a lot of sites which are very hard to read, the most common sins being:

• Animation. Animation is distracting, and makes nearby text harder to read. Animation of controls such as menus is even worse.
• Tiny type. 8pt type and smaller is pretty well completely unreadable for anyone with less than perfect sight.
• Images with small type. Using images for text is only acceptable for large typefaces, as there’s no way to make them any clearer if they are too small for you to read.
• Lack of contrast, or a poor choice of colours. Some colour/tone combinations are problematic for people with one form of colour blindness or another. There is an invaluable resource at http://colorfilter.wickline.org/ which helps the designer to ensure that the colour choices made on a webpage are acceptable for colour blind users.

In summary: if you want your site to be read, make it readable.