How to work around small fonts in Internet Explorer

This item will show some of the common methods of dealing with text that is too small to read in Internet Explorer. In addition to the common methods I will also demonstrate a technique I developed myself. Internet Explorer users have can have problems with font sizing that other browser users do not have. These are related to two root causes:

  1. Limit of five levels of text sizing.
  2. Some text cannot be resized. (Fonts specified using “px” values in CSS)
Screenshot showing Internet Explorers menu option to alter text size

The limited level of text zoom Internet Explorer offers can be compensated for using screen magnification utilities. The second problem can also be overcome using some of Internet Explorers accessibility options available from the tools menu. In recent versions of Internet Explorer going to the Tools menu and selecting the “Internet Options…” item will give you access to configuration options that can modify how Internet Explorer displays pages. Under the “General” tab there should be a button for accessibility options usually labelled “Accessibility…“. Selecting this button will open the screen for setting accessibility options.

Accessibility Dialog box showing option to ignore specified font sizes

The screen shot above shows the accessibility dialog, the important point to note here is the option to “Ignore font sizes specified on Web pages“. This option is the important one because many web pages are set up to use small text by default. There are some web sites where the size of text cannot be increased by Internet Explorer. By ignoring font sizes pages that try too set a really small font won’t be able to do so.

The uncommon solution

After briefly outlining two ways you can adjust Internet Explorers settings to better suit a persons preferred text size I’ll outline another method I have developed, however first of all I’ll identify a couple of weaknesses in the methods outlined above.

  1. Ignoring font sizes can break the layout of a page.
  2. Ignoring text sizes does not allow images containing text to be resized.
  3. A screen magnifier can be troublesome to start and use if you only need it occasionally.

I developed a couple of bookmarklet links for Internet Explorer that will resize a web page, including its graphics, to make the page more readable. This method has the advantage that it preserves the layout of the page and enlarges pictures as well as text. The two bookmarklets are my Zoom +25% bookmarklet that will zoom in on a page by 25% each time it is clicked, and my Zoom 100% bookmarklet that returns a page to its original size. These can be placed on the links bar so they are always available to click on and zoom in on a page. If you have Internet Explorer you can test if they work for you by clicking on the links in this page.

Two bookmarklets availabel from the link bar

To add these bookmarklets to your link bar you need to first make sure the link bar is visible, go to “View“, “Toolbars” and check that “Links” is selected. Drag the links bar so it is big enough to put the links on (the toolbars may be stop you resizing them, if so you need to unlock them by removing the check next to “Lock the toolbars” in the toolbars menu). When the links bar is big enough for them just click on the two links (Zoom +25%, Zoom 100%), keep the mouse button held down, and drag them to the toolbar, then let go. The links should be visible on the toolbar as shown in the screen shot above.

These bookmarklets do not work with other browsers such as Opera or Mozilla, however these browsers have generally better text resizing than Internet Explorer to start with and so don’t require these workarounds.

Update: This guy seems to have come up with a similar idea to mine.