Comment by mgkimsal | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mgkimsal | Hacker News Reader

"One of the newer groups under the accessibility umbrella, this group has become more vocal in the past few years. Those with dyslexia and ADD or ADHD have begun to press for a less busy Internet, one where ads don’t distract them to the point of being unable to use a site, or where proper contrast is used, rather than the more artistic combinations of light text against an only slightly lighter background."

IMO, browser makers failed us 15+ years ago by not making the ability to style/theme our sites more prominent as part of the UI. (and cookie management, but that's a different rant) The idea of using your own custom style sheets was always, at best, an extreme fringe feature. Yes, markup has to be 'right' for this to work, and browser makers catered to poor markup way too much in the early days. I'm not sure we can easily get out of it, but perhaps now... with a somewhat renewed focus on semantic markup and better CSS in browsers, we could encourage browsers to treat "user-specified" styling as a first class function of what it means to be a 'browser'?

Using Safari 5 right now, there's no option I can find to set a minimum font size. A 'default' font and size, yes, but that seems to be ignored or overwritten by every site I go to. It's 2012 and I still have to 'increase font size' on a number of sites I go to (and I know about keystrokes to do so - other people I know tend to just suffer with small fonts).

Firefox makes the binary choice straightforward: accept the site's styling, or use no styling: "View/Page Style/No Style". I find myself going to no style much more frequently these days, as cool UIs become fashionable but are still hard to get right, especially cross browser.

So what does someone do in between? Immerse themselves in hidden browser settings? Use greasemonkey?

Use stylish and user styles, which are just CSS with metadata.

http://userstyles.org/

Firefox has the option to let you set the font and a minimum font size, and will force all sites to stick to it. (Tools -> Options -> Content -> Advanced)

I view the entire internet in Times New Roman 20 pt. I have to turn it off for more complicated sites like amazon, where having giant font in their tiny boxes breaks functionality, but it works beautifully on simple sites like hacker news, where I spend most of my time. (And by "beautifully" I mean, it's butt-ugly, but I can sit back from the computer at a comfortably ergonomic distance and read without straining my eyes.)

> I'm not sure we can easily get out of it, but perhaps now... with a somewhat renewed focus on semantic markup and better CSS in browsers, we could encourage browsers to treat "user-specified" styling as a first class function of what it means to be a 'browser'?

Opera does this. I have a drop-down on the bottom of my window which will load in local .css files on top of sites. You can write your own, and Opera has a good selection out-of-the-box. I'm not disabled, but I will sometimes switch into the "Accessibility" layout when a site's style/layout starts annoying me. It's very readable, and very easy on the eyes. You're right that most sites need to play good with their own HTML to support this, but my experience is that it works when I want it to work.

Unrelated, but this feature is also useful for debugging. Several of the styles serve to make the HTML structure more visible on the page.

Browser makers failed us when they introduced CSS.

How exactly? (I'm actually curious.)

It turned HTML from a content delivery mechanism into what we have today.

The Internet in 1995 was a very content-rich place, even though search kinda sucked.

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