When designing a Web site, it's important to remember that all of its visitors will not necessarily be young, in fine fettle, and fully conversant with the intricacies of using a Web browser. The smart designer knows this and always builds special accessibility features into a Web site so that even older or handicapped users can use the site comfortably, without excessive strain or stress.
One of the most useful accessibility features any Web site can possess is a text size switcher. Simply put, this is a tool that allows users to alter the size of the text on a Web page, usually to make it larger and therefore easier to read. Some browsers come with this feature built-in, but novice Web users are not likely to know about it; for this reason, site designers often place easily-accessible control buttons for this purpose on each Web page.
This tutorial will show you how to add such a text size switcher to your Web pages using PHP and CSS, thereby immediately making your Web site more accessible and scoring you useful brownie points from everyone over the age of 50. Keep reading, and find out how!
Note: This tutorial assumes a working Apache/PHP installation.
How it works
Before writing any code, it's instructive to spend a few minutes understanding how the size switcher is supposed to work. Each page of the Web site will sport a set of control buttons, allowing the user to select one of three sizes for the text on the page: small, medium and large. Each of these sizes corresponds to a CSS stylesheet, which holds the rules needed to render the page in the selected size.
When the user makes a selection, PHP internally stores the selected size in a session variable and then reloads the page. The reloaded page reads the selected size from the session variable and dynamically loads the corresponding stylesheet to re-render the page in a smaller or larger size.
Procedure
Step 1: Create a Web page
Begin by creating a HTML document, complete with placeholder content. Here's an example (Listing A):
Listing A:
<html><head>
</head>
<body>
<!-- font size buttons -->
Text size: <a href="resize.php?s=small">small</a> | <a href="resize.php?s=medium">medium</a> | <a href="resize.php?s=large">large</a>
<p />
<!-- dummy page content -->
Loremipsum dolor sit amet,
consecteturadipisicingelit, sed do eiusmodtemporincididuntutlabore et dolore magna aliqua. Utenim
ad minim veniam, quisnostrud exercitation ullamcolaboris nisi utaliquip ex ea commodoconsequat.
Duisauteirure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptatevelitessecillumdoloreeufugiatnullapariatur.
Excepteursintoccaecatcupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui
officiadeseruntmollitanim id estlaborum.
</body>
</html>
Pay special attention to the text hyperlinks at the top of this page. Each hyperlink points to the script resize.php, and passes it the selected text size through the URL GET method.
Save this document to your Web server directory with a .php extension—for example, index.php.
Step 2: Create stylesheets
Next, create stylesheets for each of the available text sizes for the page: small.css, medium.css and large.css. Here's what small.css looks like:
body {font: 10px
}
In a similar manner, create medium.css and large.css, with font sizes of 17px and 25px respectively. Save these stylesheets to the same directory as the Web page created in the previous step.
Step 3: Create the text resizing mechanism
As previously described, the Web page "knows" which stylesheet to load by looking in a pre-defined session variable. This session variable is controlled by the script resize.php, (Listing B) which is activated whenever a user clicks one of the text-sizing buttons at the top of each page. Here's what resize.php looks like:
Listing B
<?php// start session
// import selected size into session
session_start();
$_SESSION['textsize'] = $_GET['s'];
header("Location: " . $_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER']);
?>
This is fairly simple. When a user selects a new text size, resize.php receives that size value through the GET method and stores it in the session variable $_SESSION['textsize']. It then redirects the browser back to the page from whence it came.
Of course, there's still one missing component: the intelligence that lets the page detect which text size is currently selected and load the appropriate stylesheet. To add this, pop open your Web page index.php, and add the following lines at the beginning of the page (Listing C):
Listing C
<?php// start session
// import variables
session_start();
// set default text size for this page
if (!isset($_SESSION['textsize'])) {
$_SESSION['textsize'] = 'medium';
}
?>
You should also add a stylesheet link between the <head>...</head> elements, as follows:
<link rel="stylesheet" href="<?php echo $_SESSION['textsize']; ?>.css" type="text/css">Here's (Listing D) what the completed index.php will look like:
Listing D
<?php// start session
// import variables
session_start();
// set default text size for this page
if (!isset($_SESSION['textsize'])) {
$_SESSION['textsize'] = 'medium';
}
?>
<html>
<head>
<link rel="stylesheet" href="<?php echo $_SESSION['textsize']; ?>.css" type="text/css">
</head>
<body>
<!-- font size buttons -->
Text size: <a href="resize.php?s=small">small</a> | <a href="resize.php?s=medium">medium</a> | <a href="resize.php?s=large">large</a>
<p />
<!-- dummy page content -->
Loremipsum dolor sit amet,
consecteturadipisicingelit, sed do eiusmodtemporincididuntutlabore et dolore magna aliqua. Utenim
ad minim veniam, quisnostrud exercitation ullamcolaboris nisi utaliquip ex ea commodoconsequat.
Duisauteirure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptatevelitessecillumdoloreeufugiatnullapariatur.
Excepteursintoccaecatcupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officiadeseruntmollitanim id estlaborum.
</body>
</html>
It should be easy to understand how this works. When the Web page is loaded, it restores the current session, checks the $_SESSION['textsize'] variable to see which text size is currently selected, and then dynamically loads the corresponding stylesheet through the <link... /> element. This causes the page to automatically re-render in the correct size.
Using PHP and CSS in this combination is slightly different from the traditional approach, which uses JavaScript to dynamically alter CSS styles. The advantage of using PHP instead of JavaScript is that you're not dependent on the client supporting JavaScript, nor do you need to worry about creating browser-specific workarounds. Perhaps you will find a use for this tip the next time you sit down to design a Web site. Happy coding!
