Anne Dickinson's activities: Mahara pages: formatting (in short: don't)

Formatting – students were asking re formatting ie font size spacing etc I wonder if there is any guidance generally re creating pages/ blogs etc that we could share with students as guidance?

I received this question by email from a colleague and there were many others who were copied into it. It was in the context of creating Mahara pages and in particular, adding text entries such as Journal entries. So I thought that it would be of interest to more people than just those copied into the email. Here's my response...

I'm looking at this from an accessibility perspective...

The specific style that Mahara gives is there for a reason! For example, have you looked at a Mahara page using a mobile phone? Try narrowing the width of your browser showing the examples. Also, you should be able to enlarge the text yourself, as a reader, by holding down ctrl and typing + (ctrl and 0 will bring it back to normal size).

I would suggest that you say to your students:

Consider your readers and don't stop them from being able to make their own adjustments.
Concentrate on the content of the pages and don't be diverted into changing the appearance of text.
Don't change the size of the font to a fixed size because it may prevent your readers from changing it for their own preferences.
If you want to use headings in their text, use the heading styles that are built in the editor. This is helpful in signposting the meanings of the following paragraphs to the readers.