Web accessibility, in a nut shell, is making your web site as usable as possible to as large a group of people as possible. One of the major parts of web accessibility is text size—each person has a text size that they are more comfortable reading. Unfortunately, one of the biggest complaints about many modern web designs is that the text size is too small.

Resizable Web Site Text

Most web browsers allow you to set your default text at different sizes, and most allow you to resize the text on a web site. In order to be usable to the largest possible group, web sites should have resizable web site text. If you can’t read the text, simply make it bigger, right?

IE’s Text Size Bug

Internet Explorer 6 has a well-known limitation—it can’t resize text that is set in points or pixels. What this means is that a site needs to have font sizes coded in percentages or ems in order for Internet Explorer 6 users to be able to resize the text.

Text Resizing on the Web

I performed a little research to see how well the web is doing with resizable web site text. The results were very interesting.

I went to Alexa.com to find my sample of web sites. I visited each of the top 100 sites in the U.S. using Internet Explorer 6. I tried to resize the text on each site, and if a significant portion of the text (75% or more) changed sizes with my settings, the site was labeled as a site with resizable text. If less than 25% of the text changed, the site was labeled as a site with a fixed text size.

Here are my results:

The blue bars are for sites with resizable text, and green is for fixed text sizes. The four columns are for ranks 1-25, 26-50, 51-75, and 76-100.

Click to Enlarge

Top Web Sites

The top web sites mostly utilize resizable text—7 out of the top 10 and 16 out of the top 25 sites have resizable text.

Bottom Web Sites

30 out of the last 50 sites have fixed text sizes.

Overall Text Results

Overall, 53 out of the top 100 sites have fixed text sizes. This means two things for the web design industry—first, it’s great that so many sites have recognized (or at least not messed up) this issue. Second, we have a ways to go until the majority of the web is easily accessible to vision impaired users.