Resizing Your Text

Saturday, August 26, 2006 0:44 | Filed in Accessibility, Articles

If you find the text on a site is too large or too small for you to read comfortably, there are many ways in which you can adjust it, depending on your browser and the platform you are using. If you find that this advice does not work for you, please let me know, indicating the browser and version you are using as well as the platform, and ideally how you can adjust the text size, if you managed to find out!

Scroll Wheel Mouse Method

If you have access to a scroll wheel mouse, hold down the CTRL key on your keyboard and scroll the wheel. This will adjust the text size on most platforms and browsers. Scrolling up will increase the text size, and scrolling down will… you guessed it, decrease the text size. If you are not able to use a scroll wheel mouse in this way, or if you wish to make a more permanent change to your text size, then you’ll have to use the browser specific techniques.

Per-Browser Methods

Depending on which browser you are using (sometimes called UA) there are other ways you can change the text size that you view sites. Simply follow the appropriate instructions from this list.

Internet Explorer (5.0+)
Select Text Size from the View menu, and choose a different text size.
Mozilla Firefox (1.0+)
Select Text Size from the View menu, and choose increase, decrease or normal as appropriate.
Netscape Navigator (7.0+)
Select Text Zoom from the View menu, and change the Zoom Percentage accordingly. Note that this only increases the size of text and not images.
Opera (8.0+)
You can zoom the entire page adjusting the size of images as well as text by selecting Zoom from the View menu and then altering the percentage zoom to suit
Or you could choose a different style mode such as “accessibility mode” by selecting View and then changing the preferred Style.
Or you can adjust the minimum font size that Opera will allow by selecting Tools, then Preferences, selecting the Advanced tab, clicking on Fonts and then changing the pixel value for Minimum Font Size. Or by this time you might prefer a nice cup of tea and a lie down

Plug-ins

You can also use the following plug-ins to make it more easy to resize your text on a given page.

Mozilla Firefox plugins:
Text size toolbar by Patrick Lauke, adds text size buttons to the toolbar
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22 Comments to Resizing Your Text

  1. Mike Cherim says:

    August 28th, 2006 at 5:17 pm

    Even though the contrast is good, I think the text is a little small in some places. But the theme was meant to use verdana. I did try it with Trebuchet, but I didn’t like the outcome. I don’t have a hard time reading it, but some might. But then again it’s all relative so they can enlarge it if those users wish to.

    No biggie, but since you asked, those are my 2-cents.

  2. Emma says:

    August 30th, 2006 at 11:47 am

    From what I’ve found, the Ctrl+scroll-wheel up/down is different across browsers:

    Firefox, Netscape + IE6: scrolling down increases the text size (as though you are pulling the screen towards yourself).

    Opera: scrolling up increases the text size, as you suggest.

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