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Ask HN: My eyesight is not good enough to read HN. What can I do?

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Ask HN: My eyesight is not good enough to read HN. What can I do?

#1
I own an iPad and an Android phone. The text on HN is simply too small for me to read.

Before HN added CSP headers, I used a bookmarklet to change the font size. But since the CSP headers were added, FF and Chrome both refuse to execute the bookmarklet.

Some might suggest to use an app instead. But I don't use apps. As a programmer I know how bad the app security models are.

Is there any solution, or am I effectively cut off from HN?

Re: Ask HN: My eyesight is not good enough to read HN. What can I do?

#2
Just wanted to comment to raise awareness for those of us without 20/20 eyesight.

HN staff: please consider having a typographer/UI designer make a few improvements to the base stylesheet. I realize the codebase may be old, but it's a paragon of Lisp purity so it should be easy to change, no? ;)

Re: Ask HN: My eyesight is not good enough to read HN. What can I do?

#3

Just wanted to comment to raise awareness for those of us without 20/20 eyesight. HN staff: please consider having a typographer/UI designer make a few improvements to the base stylesheet. I realize the codebase may be old, but it's a paragon of Lisp purity so it should be easy to change, no? ;)

My experience ist that everytime a designer touches a website things get worse :)

Current example: The Reddit redesign. It's a nightmare.

Changes to HN that would help me are:

Get rid of the CSP headers

Change the output so that the browsers reader mode can understand it.

Re: Ask HN: My eyesight is not good enough to read HN. What can I do?

#7

iOS has excellent accessibility features built in. Take a look at VoiceOver or Zoom [1]. You should be able to toggle either on easily via the Control Center. [1] https://www.apple.com/au/accessibility/iphone/vision/

There is a lot of stuff in the iOS accessibility tools, but unfortunately nothing that makes the text on HN bigger.

Ironically, setting the "dynamic text size" makes all kinds of text in the OS way too big but lets the text on HN as small as before.

And I don't want to "zoom" because that makes the text overflow the screen on the right.

Re: Ask HN: My eyesight is not good enough to read HN. What can I do?

#8
I used to have bad eyesight, just zoomed-in the page with `Cmd +` to 110% or 125%.

Unrelated to reading HN, if LASIK or similar is an option for you I would suggest you to talk to your ophthalmologist. Having eyesight corrected has been one of the best decisions I've made. It had such a drastic impact on my quality of life.

Re: Ask HN: My eyesight is not good enough to read HN. What can I do?

#9
Please take a look at Bookmarklets Context Menu, a WebExtension that allows to execute bookmarklets as privileged scripts:

https://github.com/mems/bookmarklets-context-menu

https://addons.mozilla.org/es/firefox/addon/bookmarklets-con...

Not sure if it'll work in the mobile version of Firefox though, works great in desktop.

Re: Ask HN: My eyesight is not good enough to read HN. What can I do?

#10
I have impaired vision myself and I find HN to be one of the most accessible sites around. I have set all font sizes to 32-point and do not allow any smaller fonts. Also I have chosen a font that easy to read for me and do not allow sites to select any other fonts. On bad days I disable CSS so I can have my default bright-on-dark color scheme.

Using these settings, HN is a pleasure to read! Other sites suffer, of course, because large fonts destroy their layouts, but those sites are FUBAR (from an accessibility point of view) anyway.

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