It wasn’t long ago that I wrote an article on authoring an effective text-resizing widget. In that article, I made a point not to espouse the use of text-resizing tools, since it’s generally more effective to allow people to use their browser’s built-in text-resizing functionality.

In fact, browser’s allow you a great deal more control than simply size. Modern browsers can give you extensive control over website text, including dictating background colors, text color, base text size, minimum text size, and link attributes. This post is intended to provide a quick overview of the specific controls for most modern browsers.

Most browsers have fundamentally the same options, although the interface and location in menus is quite variable. Some are more intuitive than others, and some interfaces simply don’t quite work right…

• Firefox, versions 2 and 3, Netscape 9
• Opera 9
• Safari 3
• Internet Explorer 6/7/8
• Internet Explorer, features specific to versions 7/8
• Internet Explorer, features specific to version 6
• Custom Stylesheets

Read more: Refining Text Presentation with your Web Browser: Windows

The grand old question concerning techniques and choices in web accessibility which, while common, are not necessarily helpful is a popular subject which is always around in accessibility circles. It’s certainly not a new topic for me to write on, but one which (for whatever reason) I’m going to go ahead and write about again.

In this case, I’m going to take a single commonly implemented method: the text-resizing tool, and discuss the advantages and disadvantages in some depth.

This article isn’t intended to espouse the use of text-resizing tools, but it is intended to try and describe how you can best implement a text-resizing tool to provide for your users.

Read more: Developing an effective text-resizing widget

Recently, I wrote a series of posts about what I choose to call pseudo-accessibility — part of which is the provision of website tools which emulate native browser functionality.

The reason these tools proliferate is because of developer laziness, not because of developer interest in accessibility. For some strange reason, it’s considered more difficult to educate the user about their browser than it is to build a text-resizing widget. (Granted, text-resizing widgets aren’t exactly rocket science.)

Ian Lloyd, of Accessify, has taken to video trying to address the text-resizing problem. You can see the video at his own relevant blog post — Teach a man to fish (or how to resize text).

The video isn’t necessarily a finished product. As of this writing, it’s in it’s second version , as Ian has been graciously accepting comments and re-working the video in order to provide the best video tutorial possible on the subject.

Video, of course, isn’t a perfect solution — but the transcript is available (not on Accessify.com yet, however,) and this is a good start towards user (and developer) education.

Thanks, Ian!

Thanks to Accessites and Mike Cherim for bringing this to my attention.