Older web users and text size

A lot more than 10% of the population have less than perfect vision and will struggle on sites that are designed to look cool by and for people in their 20s and 30s, and that don’t take into account the needs of people with lesser vision.

So am i chopped liver since i am almost 27 and anything over 1-2 ft away needs to be 50 pt or more without glasses?

Thinking this has ANYTHING to do with the age of the user is outright ignorant… because it can also be a hardware issue!

Not all screens have their dots the same size, some people run higher resolutions with larger default fonts – what looks great at 1366x768 on a 19" CRT might be uselessly undersized on a 17" 1920x1200 macbook pro. What looks good on that macbook pro might be completely useless on a 9" netbook.

That’s the original POINT of HTML, device neutrality – targeting multiple resolutions, font sizes, multiple screen sizes…

… and ALL you have to do is use %/EM fonts on your content area’s and stop fixing the width of pages – even semi-fluid is better than crappy stripe – NEITHER of which is “difficult” despite the artsy fartsy types getting their panties in a twist over their pretty pictures drawn in photoshop NOT being functional designs for websites and usually amounting to total and miserable accessibility failures!