Subtle changes, bugs and feedback

I don't understand why all of a sudden the internet seems to want to have everyone able to read a page from 3 x arms length. Humans haven't changed that much in so many years? Maybe in the last 20 years, those that can make change happen online are in denial over their increasing need of reading glasses?

We all want our sites to be highly readable.

The gold standard for this is a quality printed book, that you can read at arms length in a relaxed posture and without getting a headache.

It's the right number of characters per line (~75), the right breathing space between lines (~1.5 ratio between font size and line height), the right font for the content (Palatino for legal, Helvetica for headers, custom fonts like ours for body text), a high contrast between the font colour and background, etc.

If we want a wide reading area, then the characters per line increases, and so the font size increases to bring the CPL back down to within the optimal range, etc.

It's a balancing game to make the web as readable and accessible as a book.

The font size I've chosen is sublime on mobile and tablets, yet offers a good balance on large screens.

The weakness is presently with smaller laptop screens and monitors (the 1280 pixels wide by 800 pixels high, netbooks and older cheap work monitors). This affects some ~9% of users, but that % has been decreasing for a long while now as older equipment has been replaced by newer.

The 2 most popular screen sizes are now 1366 pixels wide (newer netbooks, 11" Mac Air, etc), and 1920 pixels wide. The most popular mobiles are all high DPI devices that now look really nice (excluding Opera Mini and Firefox on Android which do their best to be clunky).

All that said... what browser are you using? Firefox allows you to declare what font size you want to be applied to a site, and Chrome permits this via an add-on. I think that IE also offers this but I don't have one to hand (the IE machine is at home).