Improve Firefox accessibility with minimum font size
Posted by Percy Cabello on June 16th, 2007 • Tags:
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While working on the Safari vs. Firefox story, I found an option in Safari to set the minimum font size for web pages. I checked Firefox’s option to see if this was possible and fortunately I found that yes. It is very simple to set and I think it is a great accessibility option for people with vision problems.

  1. Open the Options window. In the Tools menu, select Options…
  2. Select the Content tab.
  3. In the Fonts & Colors section press the Advanced… button.
  4. Select an adequate value in the Minimum font size menu

The change takes place immediately. The only downside is that you may lose proportion among fonts. If some fonts are set to 12 and others to 8 , they will all become 16 after you set the minimum. Hopefully users will find it just a small inconvenience.

Set minimum font size

For proportional scaling you can always use Ctrl + = or Ctrl + - in the current page. Firefox 3 will bring site specific preferences including at least an option to remember how much zoom you prefer for a specific web page.

Comments
Hi said on June 16, 2007, 6:14 am:

It’s also great for when people try and make the text really really small.

netster007x said on June 16, 2007, 1:18 pm:

Everyone keeps saying Fx3 will have this and that and the other. There have been five alphas and still nothing apparent to the average user. There will prabably only be one or two more alphas, and they don’t add features once into betas, so how can people be sure that features will actually come? Mozilla has really been letting me down lately.

Percy Cabello said on June 18, 2007, 4:17 pm:

netster007x, you should check Firefox 3 coverage, here at Mozilla Links:
- offline web applications support
- microformats
- native audio/video possibly
- places: integrated bookmarks + history
- resume downloads between sessions, possibly
- pdf printing
- site specific preferences

and many others perhaps not as notable. There will be as many alphas as necessary I assure you.

And for some people Firefox is becoming more and more bloated.

Minimum font size in Firefox like in Safari « AB’s reflections said on June 20, 2007, 3:09 am:

[...] browser, and I was not aware of any similar functionality for minimum font size till I came across this post on Mozilla Links. Apparently, the minimum font size can be set in Firefox through Options->Content->Fonts [...]