问题
In the old times before responsive design, people used to put a font size switcher (like the image attached) to allow changing the font size of a web site.
Questions:
- Is there any good website explain why we should or should not do it any more?
- Would it be considered as not implementing accessibility (e.g. failed by the Australia Accessibility Standards) on a web site if not providing a font size switcher?
According to Responsive typography, the font size should depend on the reading distance.
I'm really tempted to not implement it because I personally don't see the point, but I don't want the product to be e.g. restricted to be sold to Australia.
General responsive design principles already suggests font size accessibility, and I think it should be a operating system or browser's responsibility to globally set the font size for a particular user. Otherwise it's really inconsistent when using the same browser to access different web sites or online systems.
Would really appreciate if someone could provide an explanation to the questions.
回答1:
The official answer is that you need to enable the resizing of text (up to 200%, criteria 1.4.4), but that can be with the built-in browser functionality.
Therefore text-size widgets have never been required for accessibility (for anything based on W3C guidelines, which is most things).
It could be that a specific organisation requires them, but it is more likely that they use text-size widgets to increase the perception that they are doing something for accessibility.
All the desktop browsers have zoom, and in fact default to zoom (rather than text-sizing) now, which is good for responsive sites as zooming will cause media-queries to activate. I.e. a high zoom level will look like the mobile-sized site. Overall this is a good thing.
Adding a text-size widget is likely to complicate your layout a great deal, as it is hard to deal with zoom and text-sizing at the same time, I would avoid it.
回答2:
The relevant WCAG 2.0 guideline is 1.4.4 Resize text (level AA):
Except for captions and images of text, text can be resized without assistive technology up to 200 percent without loss of content or functionality.
There are many techniques listed how to meet this guideline.
Among them is G142: Using a technology that has commonly-available user agents that support zoom:
The objective of this technique is to ensure content can be scaled uniformly by using a Web technology supported by user agents that change text size via a Zoom tool.
So this means: When your users use user agents (i.e., browsers) that come with a zoom function, and this zoom function allows zooming your site up to 200 % without any problems, you are fine.
How to be sure that this is the case for your users, well, is up to you.
Because this technique relies completely on user agent functionality, it is critical to test with a wide variety of user agents.
来源：https://stackoverflow.com/questions/25138948/is-it-still-necessary-to-implement-a-font-size-switcher-for-responsive-design