User Comments

“Would amazon.com use that design element on its website?”

Well they might if they were designing a website for over fifties providing information on accessibility products.

The “would amazon” thing shouldn’t be taken literally, it is more about not cluttering up the page with irrelevance.

By the way, if you used a style switcher to change your size you could also use it to address things like the text in image thing on your comments page that doesn’t resize meaning vision imapaired users are essentially blocked from posting comments on your site.

“Well they might if they were designing a website for over fifties providing information on accessibility products.”

Amazon’s text resizes nicely, using just the browser controls. They have obviously considered vision impaired users and designed accordingly - without a style switcher.

I do agree with you though - not cluttering a page with garbage is very important.

The text in the Captcha can’t be increased, even with a style-switcher, since it’s an image.

I am not stopping vision-impaired users from posting comments. The Captcha can be bypassed if a user logs-in. I had considered this. It is all explained in this entry: http://urbanmainframe.com/folders/blog/20040323/page_1.htm.

I agree that amazon have addressed this by using scaling fonts, but I do think they might reconsider if their target audience had a higher proportion of vision impared users.

I do agree that in most cases the font sizer is redundant, there are cases where it is worth having. Personally the only time I have used one was on a site for the visually impared that had a massive font by default. When I used it I felt quite grateful that my needs had been considered.

Image size can by controlled by css. Give your image an id or class, then put your height and width in em’s in the sheet and viola! It will resize when you change font size in your browser. Not the prettiest resize, but where a graphic is required for usability it may be worth doing(kind of defeats my argument for style switchers though).

I must admit James, I have used the CSS and em trick in the past for images. One other option I have is, since the images are generated on-the-fly, to produce an enlarged image programmatically - which would obviously not be degraded (however, it would have a larger file size, impacting on downloud times slightly).

Talking of CSS Trickery, I’ve noticed from viewing the source that you control your seemingly random image through a background attribute associated to the style of a div. How have you done this? Have you used PHP or Javascript or is it part of your CMS?

Robert, the random images are selected by the CMS. A small Perl script indexes a folder then randomly chooses a filename. That filename is then embedded in the template and the web-browser does the rest.