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Comment by geuis | Hacker News Reader

I wish I could get a list of every web developer in the world and mail them a copy of this in a holiday card with a cookie attached.

I'd like to see a report that has the age curve of internet users, a projection of that curve over the next 20 years, and that curve in relation to the average decline of eye sight over time.

My hypothesis is that given the declining birth rates all over the world, most users are going to be older and therefore have worse eyesight than younger folks.

Make your fonts bigger!

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I have terrible eye-sight at the ripe old age of 21. I've had terrible eye-sight since my age was a single digit.

All I ask of web designers is to consider us as much as they would somebody who has no sight as all.

If I sound pretentious, I invite you to read my reply below.

I have terrible eye-sight

So do I, but even then I prefer text sizes such as seen on HN, I don't like excessive scrolling and lots line spacing, or serifs for that matter. This new trend of websites with huge, fancy fonts is not for me, and it honestly never occured to me there might be more going on than just trading reading speed for pretentiousness; but I can't see through the eyes of others, so I'll just have to continue to make websites how they look best to me.

It's up to me to make sure it's resizable and not too hung up on being presented a specific way, but it's up to the web surfers to configure their browsers accordingly. To me that's kind of the point of HTML, that I can't know and shouldn't care how you read the site. A lot of websites fail real hard in that regard, but increasing their font-sizes won't fix the problem. You should be able to ultimately define how you consume the information... some people disagree, they'd rather make brochures; blame those, blame that mindet, and leave small fonts alone :(

You don't have to make fonts larger, just give me a way of increasing the size without either destroying the website layout or making the site that much more unreadable. I would like more flexibility and less rigidity. More times than not I have been plagued by text hiding behind a side-bar, narrow containers constraining the sections like a straw, and/or the layout breaking completely in the process.

I'd like to see less designers make presumptions about their audience. While ignoring a smaller section of their audience is fine when the "fix" is hundreds of man-hours away and many dollars burned, this situation is completely rectifiable within short time-periods in most cases and little money spent. Being responsive to your audience isn't a slippery-slope into dystopian large-textinship; it's a way to treat all of your visitors without leaving any wanting of a good experience.

I would like more flexibility and less rigidity.

I completely agree, and I guess I'm in the clear then... I religiously believed in fluid layouts way before responsive web design and whatnot where even concepts. It's just that I like the default "more tight" than what seems to be the preference of many, reading these posts - but if you're willing to zoom, I'm willing to make that as painless as possible :D

> but if you're willing to zoom,

:p How about you zoom out? That means you can have normal (huge) text for everyone.

Because I have glasses the nearly thickness of coke bottle bottoms and no problems with small text, because I didn't wait decades for high-res displays that don't flicker just to throw the resolution away again, and mostly because I don't really look at individual letters as glance across them when reading a normal text with known words, so for me smaller fonts allow scanning larger chunks more quickly, and parsing words and phrases in chunks as well, while moving the eyes back and forth and scrolling a whole lot hinder me from simply absorbing the text. In short, because it's more efficient for me and there are bound to be people for whom it's the same. Because designing for my own actual eyes strikes me as honest or something.

> Make your fonts bigger!

Within a 600px vertical column with 150% line spacing. With gentle contrast. Please.

Or at least test your site on all the big article reformatters.

600px? Are you using a 1024x768 monitor from 2000?

Depending on the font size, 600px gets you pretty close to the ideal of 50-75 characters per line: http://baymard.com/blog/line-length-readability

Nope. But I am reading it on a 1280x800 tablet in portrait mode. Or I have two side by side 0n a 2560x1440 monitor (effectively 1280 px wide each). Or even worse, two side by side on a laptop with 1920x1200 (960 px wide each). 600px makes all of the above scenarios doable with reasonable margins and other layout items like a navigation menu and ads.

You are aware that we have multi-tasking operating systems today?

> 600px? Are you using a 1024x768 monitor from 2000?

Why do you think they call it "newspaper column" and not "newspaper spread"? It's because the best way to read is in a narrow column (1/3 ... 1/2 the width of the screen). Otherwise the eyes need to move horizontally too much and risk losing position.

Horizontal, right? Or are you thinking of tablet scrolling?

Yeah... I've also noticed some sites for some reason won't let me re-size the text. It may be just a bug in tablet's browser but it's damned annoying.

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