Ian Lloyd is on a mission, to educate people about resizing text using their browser and eventually eliminating the JavaScript based text resizing widgets. Not because they look bad, but because they give a wrong idea to the everyday user. He has gone ahead a step and provided a video (transcript).
The ability to resize the text is part of your browser, and not the web site. Education can enable the users more. This is the premise behind using resizable units for text sizes in your design. As Roger says, a lot of sites use text-resize widget as a band-aid, and the widget itself is not accessible in case JavaScript or cookies are disabled. Using resizable text sizes and educating the user about resizing the text is the best way to make the text accessible in all environments.
Unfortunately even the popular browsers do not make it apparent enough. The next step, I think, is to build a text to let the user know how to resize the text in all browsers. It will really help if browsers include toolbar buttons for resizing text by default.
Not an extension of this, but as part of my experiment to give up control, I have unset the fonts and font sizes for this blog. Which means that currently it is using those settings from your browser. I always felt that in spite of font-families you could never ensure using the best font on the platform. The reason I am calling this an experiment is because I am not sure if this will work for all and for all web sites. But this does let you choose the font and font-size you like to use.
October 15th, 2007 at 11:20 am
[...] I expecting too much from the reader? I do not know, but I am sure that readers need to be at least aware of this. This has made many, including myself, use fractional font-sizes while working with web [...]