An e-mail about the 'turbo-charged' style switcher from David Sloan
Hi Jim,
Good work!
My feeling is that once upon a time I thought that anyone providing anything on a web page that allows someone to change settings for that site was wasting their time, as there could be conflicts with browser settings or user defined CSS. But in late 2003, browsers are still not doing what they should - explicitly showing people that there are settings and techniques that allow customisation of page display, and making it easy for them to do this.
It shouldn't have to be the designer's responsibility to provide e.g. a large text or alternative colour combination version of their pages, but since the browsers aren't doing much about it, if a site provides an explicit option to adjust display preferences, then that's got to be an immediate usability aid - helping the user who otherwise wouldn't know that they can achieve a similar result by going into the View menu or Options or wherever, or writing and applying their own style sheet (assuming they knew how...)
But such a feature would still have to make it clear that it only worked with the current site (which of course has been designed with semantically correct HTML!). A negative spin off is likely to be that users will begin to expect these features on every site, and expect them to offer the same functionality and results. But until a) browser options improve, and b) user knowledge improves, it's a decent interim solution.
I think it's going to be particularly valuable for the low-profile and often ignored, but statistically very significant, "grey" area covering people with less severe impairments or combination of minor impairments the effect of which is hard to predict and design for. For example there are millions of web users with less than perfect sight who certainly aren't going to be buying magnification software but have maybe forgotten their glasses, or need a (new) pair of glasses, or who generally have no problems with sites but today this one is just a little too hard to read...
Anyone requiring assistive technology - or who knows how to apply a user defined style sheet - wouldn't need to bother using the feature. )
A couple of specific suggestions:
- changing text colour schemes also needs to include allowing changes to hypertext appearance. You don't want to allow people to choose yellow text on blue background but prevent them from changing hyperlinks from the same blue... And form text size - ok, there's a limit to what you can control in terms of HTML form components, but any text size change should apply as far as possible.
- a colour picker chart might be more appropriate than a text menu of colours (the effect of the change is more likely to be seen by the user as they select their preferences) Of course this begins to complicate things for you and the user :-/
(apologies if you already had these in mind for a fuller version)
Let us know how you get on!
Dave