Comment by montroser

Comment by montroser 5 days ago

20 replies

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Good problem to solve, but this particular solution is a fast path to hell for everyone involved.

You just can't scale text size independently of layout and interface. The size of the text is fundamentally related to the structural layout of the page. The number of columns, the size of images, the relative placement of buttons and UI elements -- it's all inextricably tied to the size of the text.

Good news is that we already have a solution for this: responsive design, aka page zoom. Every serious site already gracefully handles a wide range of viewport widths. When you zoom in, you are simply simulating a narrower viewport width. This type of constraint and flexibility is already well tested. Zooming in makes the text bigger. And, zooming in makes the layout adapt to a single column when that's all that will fit. It all works harmoniously together, because we test and accommodate for all viewport sizes, which is the same as all zoom levels.

The proposal at hand to scale text alone is bad for everyone. Developers now have a geometric set of permutations to test. What about an ultra-wide viewport with large text? What about a small viewport with large text? What about a wide viewport with small text? It's so much that it won't make business sense to invest in all of the testing, and all of the design and implementation work to accommodate all of the cases. And so, it will be bad for end users who will set their text size to their preference, and then find that actually usability and readability are now worse.

In the end the answer is simple: when users set their text size to be larger in the OS, browser vendors should increase the default zoom in browsers. This is already how it works on Windows, and it is definitely the best path to happiness for all.

dfabulich 5 days ago

That's the testing matrix we have to do for iOS and Android apps today. The screen sizes don't go all the way up to ultrawide, but 13" iPad (portrait and landscape) down to 4" iPhone Mini, at every "Dynamic Type" display setting is required.

It's not that tough, but there can be tricky cases.

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  • mananaysiempre 5 days ago

    Also with every relevant locale, as English UI strings are usually abnormally short.

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mjmas 5 days ago

This is supporting something that already exists for native phone apps. My phone has separate options for display size and text size.

And so I have it set to have smaller buttons but still a normal-size font.

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  • homebrewer 5 days ago

    In addition, desktop Firefox has had support for "zoom text only" for about 20 years or so (can be enabled in settings). It works fine.

    Don't know about mobile, probably works there too.

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    • montroser 5 days ago

      Well, it does what it says, if that's what you mean by "works". But I don't think my grandpa is going to be happy with the results.

      Here's NYT with that firefox "zoom text only" enabled: https://i.imgur.com/zp7pDW3.png

      See the chopped "rld" on the left? That's the link to the "World" section. To the left of that off the screen should be the "U.S." section. But there's no horizontal scroll bar or any way to get to it, or any way to even know it exists. Categories spill off the right too, and you can't get to those either. This anti-feature, in the name of accessibility has actually just made things worse.

      For reference, here's the totally sensible result if you just don't enable "zoom text only": https://i.imgur.com/Kkd5aOu.png

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crazygringo 5 days ago

Seriously.

Browsers originally had text zoom -- only text zoom -- until page zoom was invented, I can't remember by which browser. And then page zoom quickly became the "main" zoom mechanism across all browsers because it was obviously so much better -- icons, layout, everything adjusted together. (And for those who remember, when there was only text zoom, it was a common practice/workaround to define everything in em rather than px, precisely to "fake" page zoom with text zoom.)

I'm baffled by the idea of trying to bring text zoom back. Just no, a million times. We tried it. It was bad.

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  • wlesieutre 5 days ago

    Page zoom is fine for relatively minor adjustments, but if you're browsing with a high page zoom setting you'll still run into a ton of problems.

    Stuff like "page overlays become so large that they overflow the bounds of the screen, but are fixed position so you can't even scroll them to make the X button visible."

    Or in the slightly better case, "most of the screen is obscured by the enlarged floating header, the layout of which is totally broken by the relatively narrow viewport relative to content size, and with your large page zoom setting the remaining half of the screen can fit about five words on it at a time."

    Either way websites need to do accessibility testing and clearly most of them don't.

    Safari has a setting for "Never use font sizes smaller than __" which used in combination with a not as high page zoom setting is a little less likely to make pages completely fucked, because it's only acting on text that was small to begin with.

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    • crazygringo 5 days ago

      There's no expectation that sites ought to work perfectly with 500% zoom, even though a browser supports that as a zoom value. The same way there's no expectation they work with a horizontal viewport size of 50px. Because they're the same thing, and when you push any design too far it breaks. That's just reality.

      And with page overlays, text zoom isn't necessarily going to fix anything. Sometimes the button to dismiss is at the bottom, and the larger text will just push that off-screen downwards. (I do agree that pop-ups/overlays designed for a screen larger than yours are a problem, but that's often less about zoom than just assuming small/short phone screens no longer exist.)

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      • wlesieutre 4 days ago

        500% maybe not, but I've seen sites blow up at much less drastic zoom levels.

        The unfortunate reality of accessibility is that there was no expectation of wheelchair ramps until the ADA forced everyone to quit saying "but ramps cost money and I don't personally need that" and do the right thing, web accessibility may end up requiring the same treatment.

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  • ValdikSS 5 days ago

    Oh, and there's TWO page zooms btw: the one you activate with +/- (or ctrl + +/-), and another one available with touchpad pitch-to-zoom / touchscreens (you can't use it on desktops without touchpad/touchscreen).

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  • gary_0 5 days ago

    My memory that far back is hazy but I seem to recall being able to do full-page zoom in Opera circa 2003.

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fassssst 5 days ago

> This is already how it works on Windows, and it is definitely the best path to happiness for all.

Actually Windows has a newish independent text scale accessibility setting that is different than display scale.

Yea, sometimes you have to update your UI to account for that, but it’s not a big deal most of the time.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/apps/develop/input...

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yencabulator 4 days ago

> Every serious site already gracefully handles a wide range of viewport widths.

... he writes, on a site that forces horizontal scrolling on mobile.

If I make HN font readable size on portrait phone using just zoom, the page is 4 screens wide.

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