The older I get, the more my eyes complain that they are past 40 now. I'm having more trouble reading on the screen these days than I did ten or even five years ago, and somehow I suspect it is not going to get better (lol).

Thus, I've become more sensitive to readability issues in regards to font size. There are two instances in particular where designers really should pay more attention to accessibilty:

Form input previews

It seems almost every input form I encounter on the web could benefit from a preview option before submission. For instance, after I posted the comment A proposal for the adoption of open source software in education on Insider Higher Ed, I immediately wonder, "How could I miss seeing these errors in my post?" Well, it's partially because I was (a) in a hurry (my fault) and (b) because I can't see it well.

Many sites use tiny little input boxes which display very few lines and have a very narrow width, making it more difficult to proofread the text. This is particularly a problem when posting a comment online when I'm including HTML code in text (HTML code is inherently harder to proofread anyway).

Other input boxes use either small or less legible fonts. When coupled with narrow text boxes, enlarging the text using the browser text size controls just initiates a readability tradeoff given the previous point.

So designers take note. Simply allowing (or requiring) people to preview a post in the font size, display width, and style it would appear on the page before submitting is always a big plus.

Lack of global font settings for Mac OSX

For years, I've heard Apple fanatics spreading the word about Mac's supposedly more user-friendly operating system. In the last couple of weeks, I've been using a new PowerMac G5 in my office. The jury is still out on whether it's more user-friendly than Windows, but I will say I find the lack of configuraiton options frustrating. I'm afraid that the fewer-configuration-options-is-less-confusing-for-users approach to usability is very misguided. If the Apple usability experts truly believe that, then at least make sure that a full range of configuration options are available through command line editing of config files.

But my particular pet peeve in this regard is about accessibility; there seems to be no way to raise or lower the dpi settings, a handy feature for globally increasing text size across all applications. Now I could decrease the screen resolution on the LCD, but most monitors tend to do much better displaying their native resolution. And please, that zoom feature is nice, but who really wants to have to constantly zoom in to make text larger?

So get a grip, Apple designers. For a system to be truly user-friendly, it needs to be very accessibility oriented.