Web Style Guide: TYPOGRAPHY - Sandhills Community College

Web Style Guide: TYPOGRAPHY
the layout, it is undeniable that the low-vision user ought to be able to gain access to the content.
With the introduction of the FONT tag, designers also gained the ability to set the font size. With CSS,
designers have many methods for setting type size, although, as with many other CSS properties, all are
not fully supported. The W3C recommends that you let users set the base font size in their browser and
that you set all variations using the "em" unit. An em in the Web context is the same as the font height,
which makes it a relative unit and therefore flexible. For example, if the user-set default is 12-point, then
a 2-em text indent would be 24-point, but if the user used the text zoom feature of the browser to change
the size to 16-point, the indent would change to 32-point to reflect the larger type size.
P { font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 1em; text-indent:
2em }
As you might imagine, this flexibility can send page layouts into disarray. If you try this approach, use a
flexible page layout that will hold up to large type.
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