What about giving the reader more control over things like font type and
size ?
This is really not so hard to do. A special page could offer choices in
font size, style and colour. The choices would be stored in a cookie
(ok, a small minority will not benefit from this). Settings are applied
through javascript after the page has loaded. So, minimal overhead for
the server, it just includes a static js file. Direct feedback for the
user, click a different size and presto! view the results. These
formatting options might be added to the preferences page.
See for an example of font type switching this service page: (it is in
Dutch but choices are obvious):
http://www.gemm.nl/webgemms/service.html
In this case the javascript changes from one CSS file to another. That
is too complicated too maintain. Instead all preferences could be
applied on the go by javascript iself.
For example my Wikipedia statistics pages remembers table font size:
http://www.chello.nl/epzachte/Wikipedia/Statistics
Erik Zachte