Yeesh. I hear you about the inherent teeniness of the S2 style - on my high-resolution laptop, it's minuscule even at 150%, and as I spend 10+ hours/day reading on a screen and I'm trying to keep my vision, I don't love that. Also, believe it or not, I made an effort to make the fonts bigger in my current LJ layout, because I know people have problems with font size on LJ. It's still, well, small. But not as small as S2 wanted it to be, which I consider to be some kind of success.
But enough about my pain. We cannot allow mere font size to stand between you and your daily dose of LJ (or drive you to homicide). So my question to you is: what browser are you using? If your answer is "IE," then it's time to switch to Firefox or Opera, both of which will allow you to control the font size of the pages you visit, easily and effectively. You can also use them to force inconveniently-colored pages (although, seriously, mine at least should be fully readable as far as color goes; if you get a chance, please have a look and let me know, because I whine enough about color choice that I'd like to not be a total hypocrite with my own LJ layout) to display in the way you prefer.
(I know all of this, including what follows, because my mother's much more than half blind, and I am in charge of rendering her computer accessible to her. And I tell you truly: if my mother can use her computer and browse the internet, anyone with any vision at all can.)
Advantages of Firefox: it's free (and non-profit and open-source), has about a million free add-ons, and is the easiest to use in terms of font-size changing. Disadvantages of Firefox: it's memory-hungry; if you do massively tabbed browsing, the way I do (by which I mean, 50 or so tabs open at once, but if you're using IE I'm not sure you even the option of tabbed browsing - I have no idea what features IE has these days), you'll experience browser crashes. Also, it identifies itself as Mozilla (which it is), meaning you'll be locked out of websites that do that moronic browser-detection Java dealie. (Which is fortunately not many of them.) Also, if you use bookmarks the way I do - most people don't - you'll be frustrated with some of Firefox's limitations.
Advantages of Opera: it's fast and it's not at all memory-hungry (I can tab to my little heart's content, even with many other big hungry programs running). It can be told to mask itself as the browser of your choice. Also, fewer programs are written to take advantage of its security weaknesses, because it has the least market penetration right now. Disadvantages of Opera: the free version has an ad in the top right corner (though you can learn to ignore it pretty quickly, or you can pay $39 or $49 to make it go away). It's made by an actual company that has to stay in business for you to continue to get updates. And increasing the font size can require more steps (by which I mean, two clicks of the mouse instead of a keyboard shortcut - we're still not talking about a time investment).
You can download Firefox, and learn more about how and why it's made, here (http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/). You can download a free version of Opera - and behold one of the most inexplicably disturbing photos ever used in advertising - here (http://www.opera.com/). (The photo alone is worth a look. The Opera folk are apparently quite, quite weird.)
Seriously. There is no reason to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous layouts or let other people control what you can read. (Including me. Though at least I have good intentions.) And if for some reason you can't change browsers - although it will be easy, I swear - or you have questions or problems, let me know. (You can email me at deepbluesea @ postmark . net rather than comment here, if you like.) There are other solutions; if necessary, you can even use the accessibility options on your computer itself to do this (although it's kind of messy and kind of a pain, so you don't want to do that unless you absolutely have to).
no subject
But enough about my pain. We cannot allow mere font size to stand between you and your daily dose of LJ (or drive you to homicide). So my question to you is: what browser are you using? If your answer is "IE," then it's time to switch to Firefox or Opera, both of which will allow you to control the font size of the pages you visit, easily and effectively. You can also use them to force inconveniently-colored pages (although, seriously, mine at least should be fully readable as far as color goes; if you get a chance, please have a look and let me know, because I whine enough about color choice that I'd like to not be a total hypocrite with my own LJ layout) to display in the way you prefer.
(I know all of this, including what follows, because my mother's much more than half blind, and I am in charge of rendering her computer accessible to her. And I tell you truly: if my mother can use her computer and browse the internet, anyone with any vision at all can.)
Advantages of Firefox: it's free (and non-profit and open-source), has about a million free add-ons, and is the easiest to use in terms of font-size changing.
Disadvantages of Firefox: it's memory-hungry; if you do massively tabbed browsing, the way I do (by which I mean, 50 or so tabs open at once, but if you're using IE I'm not sure you even the option of tabbed browsing - I have no idea what features IE has these days), you'll experience browser crashes. Also, it identifies itself as Mozilla (which it is), meaning you'll be locked out of websites that do that moronic browser-detection Java dealie. (Which is fortunately not many of them.) Also, if you use bookmarks the way I do - most people don't - you'll be frustrated with some of Firefox's limitations.
Advantages of Opera: it's fast and it's not at all memory-hungry (I can tab to my little heart's content, even with many other big hungry programs running). It can be told to mask itself as the browser of your choice. Also, fewer programs are written to take advantage of its security weaknesses, because it has the least market penetration right now.
Disadvantages of Opera: the free version has an ad in the top right corner (though you can learn to ignore it pretty quickly, or you can pay $39 or $49 to make it go away). It's made by an actual company that has to stay in business for you to continue to get updates. And increasing the font size can require more steps (by which I mean, two clicks of the mouse instead of a keyboard shortcut - we're still not talking about a time investment).
You can download Firefox, and learn more about how and why it's made, here (http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/).
You can download a free version of Opera - and behold one of the most inexplicably disturbing photos ever used in advertising - here (http://www.opera.com/). (The photo alone is worth a look. The Opera folk are apparently quite, quite weird.)
Seriously. There is no reason to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous layouts or let other people control what you can read. (Including me. Though at least I have good intentions.) And if for some reason you can't change browsers - although it will be easy, I swear - or you have questions or problems, let me know. (You can email me at deepbluesea @ postmark . net rather than comment here, if you like.) There are other solutions; if necessary, you can even use the accessibility options on your computer itself to do this (although it's kind of messy and kind of a pain, so you don't want to do that unless you absolutely have to).