Comment by wlesieutre

Comment by 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.

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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- crazygringo 4 days ago
  
  Remember it's the same as a smaller screen.
  If you have vision problems such that sites don't work at the zoom level you need, then you simply need to purchase or use a device with a larger screen. Then the larger zoom level will work, because there's more space for it.
  The world adopted responsive design a long time ago to be mobile-friendly. That inherently made page zoom highly effective even at larger levels. If you need to push it to extreme levels, you need to get a larger screen.
  And there's always pinch-to-zoom on top if you really need it. Plus screen magnification utilities.
  
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  wlesieutre 4 days ago
  
  "Just get a bigger screen" is such a lame excuse, and it doesn't even work.
  Here's what chatgpt.com looks like on an iPhone 17 Pro Max with the page zoom turned up: https://imgur.com/XXweCSj
  It's such an absolutely pathetic use of the viewport space. And this is exactly that kind of thing that giving pages separate text scaling awareness instead of only page zoom will be able to improve. Most of the stuff using up the limited relative viewport size did not need to be enlarged.
  Insisting that blind people should accept wasting left and right thirds of their screen space (seriously, look at the size of the chat bubble where you can see a tiny slice of it peeking through) on zooming in the white space and just buy bigger devices that don't even exist to accommodate this, all because uniformly blowing up all page elements is easier for developers is… I'll be polite and say it's not something I agree with.
  
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