Re: Pre-Fontal lobotomy (was Re: True font sizes)
John B. Matthews wrote:
In article <ha3rk4$430$1@news.eternal-september.org>,
Eric Sosman <esosman@ieee-dot-org.invalid> wrote:
When your eyes grow as old as mine, Roedy (and I thought
they already had?), you may come to value the ability to
override some youngster's notion of what's legible.
Not too long ago, I asked the ophthalmologist if the optometrist could
instruct the optician to grind single-focus lenses optimized to my usual
desktop viewing distance.
"The King asked the Queen, and the Queen asked the Dairymaid"
I shouldn't have been surprised to learn that
it was a common request. Recycling old frames and declining the common
frills, I got an inexpensive pair of "computer" glasses to complement my
bifocals. They're great, as long as I don't try to drive with them.
Sounds like something worth trying. Quite recently I
suffered through a MANDATORY series of on-line training courses
(best forgotten), all implemented in Flash, immune to the browser's
magnification controls. The fonts came out teeny-tiny; the only
thing that saved me was that even upon enlargement (reading glasses
*and* a hand-held magnifier, it turned out that the message conveyed
by the itsy-bitsy glyph-ghosts was mostly free of meaningful content
and could be safely ignored.
A plea to Web designers and others who put together
presentations and displays of various kinds: Please do not
value your own oh-so-gorgeous layout over the reader's ability
to read! Your reader may, like me, be an aging dinosaur with
feeble eyes, or may be a young sharp-eyed person who wants to
view your material on a tiny cell phone screen -- either way,
if you insist on your layout to the exclusion of legibility you
might as well just scrap the text and show pretty pictures.
Pre-literacy rulez, o Weh!
--
Eric Sosman
esosman@ieee-dot-org.invalid