The WordPress theme I was previously using on this site (“White as Milk”) puts all the text into an extremely narrow column. Not only is this a poor use of screen space, it throws up an accessibility barrier: if a visually impaired user needs to increase the font size, the narrow-column layout only fits a few words per row. Thanks to reader Nicholas Shanks for bringing this problem to my attention.
WordPress offers a bewildering variety of themes, most of which are too fancy for my taste. The new theme (“Sandbox”) is the most minimal one I could find, and should avoid the problem Nicholas had with the previous theme.
November 10, 2008 at 8:33 pm
i like the barthelme theme, which is pretty similar to this one, except it has light-blue headlines. Which is so hard to pull off
November 10, 2008 at 9:15 pm
That’s for the incredibly responsive update (best I’ve ever seen). The first line of this post now breaks between “text” and “into” at the width the window was when I came here, but a max-width parameter would help the converse problem of the line length getting too long if the browser window is very wide. FWIW, I had intended to add the previous comment to the end of the “These things I believe” page, which is why it started out the way it did. I only realised after clicking submit that I was typing into the wrong tab
November 11, 2008 at 3:07 am
Only issue with full width layouts is that text often goes over 15 words per line. This number isn’t so few that you eye darts to quickly from line to line that it becomes annoying, and not too much where tracking lines becomes more too careful.
November 18, 2008 at 7:42 pm
Wow. I thought you accidentally deleted your CSS file. :-/ Looks horrible.
November 19, 2008 at 3:31 pm
In my experience narrow columns of text tend to be a lot easier to read and I generally favour making use of them in my designs. For visually impaired users, a potential solution to the narrow column problem would be to make use of elastic layouts by specifying width in em units which scale when text is resized.
November 26, 2008 at 6:23 am
Ah. No wonder this site is giving me a headache now.
Book designers tip: A legible layout has 10-14 words per line. Any more (like this) and it’s headache time. Any less and the lines are chopped up.
The thing to do is make a layout which scales column size to font size.
yrs–
–Ben