Reading standards

1 min read

I’ve used screens varying in size and resolution for work as well as for personal, but only recently when using my new MBA that I found generally reading stuff is fucking awful!

At work I use an iMac, the screen is fairly large and I’m sitting fairly close to the screen; small text size seemed more forgiving. I have an iPad, and again when I use this I’m fairly close to the screen and if I’m far I normally just enlarge the site I’m viewing. My previous Macbook (Pro) was a 15 inch one, the text on that seemed alright most of the time; I think my habit of being up close to the screen hid the fact that small sized text were hard to read. On occasions I’ve really felt the strain of small text size.

Now, I’ve used my MBA for a week or so and I’m finding general reading on the web so bad. Because of its screen size and the way I’ve distanced my head away slightly from the screen I find text on some sites excruciatingly small. Tumblr for example, as I’m writing this post on my MBA from a “distance” with a font size 13px, the text looks like alphabetical ants.

I don’t want to sound like an old man with an eye site problem but would it hurt to bump the text size a few pixels more as a default starting point? Why does paragraph text have to be so small?

What would be nice is to be able to browse the web without having to glue my eyes to the screen or manually bump up the text size.

I’ve read these before and have just read them again, they just make perfect sense. Here are the articles:

typography accessibility