Solipsus

When coding a website it is very important, from an accessibility view, to make sure that your text is resizable. This makes things more flexible for the user as they might have bad eye-sight or generally prefer larger text on the screen than you offer. What most people do not realise (and in general it is the younger ones) is to use pixel values for text in their CSS. A way to get around this is to use em’s and percentages. I will not go so much into this, but if you wish to read up more on it, here are some nice links for you read up on:

• Babblative; Easily Resizable Text
• Pixel Acres; Relative font sizing made easy

As a web developer, I have to make sure that the design I produce coded matches the design picture signed off by the client exactly. I used to come up with em values by just guessing and seeing if it looked the same as my design in Photoshop, but that doesn’t really work in business and is bad practice.

This is where the main point of this post comes in, the Em Calculator. It is my bible at work and is great for working out em values as it means you can put in your pixel value (for example you wanted your body font to be 12px) and it will give you the exact em value. Using our example would return 0.75em. Especially helpful when you have to work down the different elements in the page which have already specified em values. So give it a try.

Ben