Fixing Facebook's Font Size Frustration

arnab.org

3 points·arnabdotorg··4 comments

Is this actually a problem for people or just a case of something new being considered bad? I find the new slightly smaller font to be cleaner and make the layout nicer. I think it hardly causes anything near eye strain and that if you weren't strained before the difference is unlikely to change that.

Yes this is a real problem and it's not just Facebook. Designers are often young and typically have very, very good eyesight, much better than the average population.

Out in the real world, the average young person probably has good eyesight and the average middle aged person has so-so eyesight and older people generally have crappy eyesight.

But then there are lots of people of all ages who have poor vision, weird quirks, colour blindness, tunnel vision, or clinical blindness.

Arbitrarily reducing a font from small to teeny is basically a slap in the face to anyone with less than perfect eyesight.

Yes, a user can adjust their browser settings to enlarge the fonts but when you do that to Facebook, for example, it makes all the text larger and the whole thing looks like shite.

Well, it was a problem for me, so I fixed it, and thought I'd share :)

Notably my 2 issues were:

1) My eyes hurt so much that I preferred using my iPhone over a 24" screen. After installing this, my eyes are feeling much better. Maybe I'm just old.

2) Before, my Friends' status messages were 13px, everything else was 11px. I prefer that my friends' thoughts be more important than UI chrome.

Most of the discussion in our lab about the change is that the text is now too small for quick reading. I'm pretty glad this extension is here.

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