Joshua Flanagan

I do most of my blog reading at night, relaxing on my recliner with my Toshiba m200 Tablet PC in portrait mode. The 1400x1050 resolution 12" screen is usually perfect for the up-close usage mode of a tablet, but my aggregator of choice, NewsGator Online, made the usability faux pas of hardcoding the blog content font to a specific point size. A very tiny point size. Since it is hardcoded in their style, they effectively disable the View|Text Size feature of Internet Explorer. If i were using Firefox, as I do on most of my other machines, I could use something like Greasemonkey to change the style that NewsGator uses. Unfortunately, Firefox's input controls were not coded to comply with accessibility standards on the Windows OS, so the Tablet Input Panel doesn't work (maybe they'll fix it in 1.5?).

My solution is to use the previously unnoticed (by me) "Accessibility..." button on the General tab of Tools|Internet Options.... Check the box that says "Format documents using my stylesheet" and then specify a css file on your local filesystem. My custom css file contains the following entry:

where "postdiv" is the name of the class that NewsGator Online applies to the contents of a post. Now the text shows up twice as big, and is much more readable.

As an added convenience, I also mapped one of the hardware pen buttons at the top of my tablet to the "Home" key, so that I can quickly return to the top of the page after reading a long string of posts in a category. This lets me avoid a bunch of pen dragging scrolling to get back to the list of blogs at the top left of the page.