Comment by wlesieutre

Comment by 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.

crazygringo 4 days ago

If that's the level of text size you require, you should be using sites on a large tablet, not a phone. A phone screen isn't large enough for your vision period. This is like expecting a website to be usable on an Apple Watch display. Be reasonable here.

At some point you just have to accept that your vision accommodations need to be met with a combination of hardware and software, not just software alone.

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wlesieutre 4 days ago

Blind people use phones smaller than this with large text all day long and the inability of web developers to accommodate it is an embarrassing failure of web developers and web platforms.
In the ChatGPT example, the entire interface boils down to a scrolling chat history, a text input box, and a send button. It's hard to imagine an interface that would be easier to fit in a small viewport than this. But the current reliance on full page zoom and poor responsiveness to viewport space (maintaining huge side margins in a narrow window) means it sucks.
Their mobile app works fine with large accessibility text sizes (iOS goes up to 310%). There's no fundamental reason the web shouldn't be able to handle an accessible interface with enlarged text equally well. The current state of web accessibility is just bad.
It can be better, but only if people do the work to make that happen. Curb cuts and wheelchair ramps didn't exist until we built them, and they gave a lot of people with mobility limitations the ability to get around independently. Unfortunately it took heavy handed regulation to force the issue, because so much of the population is content to say "I'm not the one in a wheelchair, why should I care about that?"
My hope would be that enough people in tech do care about accessibility and it won't require that level of regulation. And I'm thankful that Chrome is looking at ways to improve the current situation.

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- crazygringo 4 days ago
  
  > It's hard to imagine an interface that would be easier to fit in a small viewport than this.
  It's a website. We already have responsive design between desktop and mobile. You're essentially asking for a third modality that is essentially purely text and buttons without margins or padding, something that would work for closer to Apple Watch screens. You're showing a case where you need everything 3x larger in each dimension, which gives you nine times less usable space on your screen. Asking interfaces to work in one-ninth the usual space of an already space-constrained phone screen seems unreasonable to me.
  If you need 3x magnification in each dimension and want to browse the web, you really just need a larger device. That's an accomodation that exists. Tablets exist. This isn't the equivalent of needing curb cuts and wheelchair ramps, because larger screens are already available for this level of visual disability.
  
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- [removed] 4 days ago
  
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