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

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

#11

Post by gm-conspiracy » Sun, May 20, 2018, 9:56 AM UTC

wunderwaffe wrote: post #7

taspeotis wrote: post #5

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.

What about reader mode in mobile Safari?

Or maybe some JS bookmarklet (never tried w/ iOS Safari), personally.

I also thought there was an "Accessibility Zoom" that uses 3-fingers (for all iOS, not specific app)?

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

#12

Post by fwn » Sun, May 20, 2018, 9:56 AM UTC

wunderwaffe wrote: post #6

Tomte wrote: post #4

Try a user stylesheet with your browser.

Afaik mobile browsers don't support user stylesheets.

A dark mode extension I'm using on Firefox for Android works as an css injector. One would only have to configure a custom stylesheet instead of a dark theme.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/dark-mode-web...

uBlock Origin, the content blocking extension I'm using on Firefox for Android, can inject css rules as well.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ublock-origin...

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

#13

Post by nils-m-holm » Sun, May 20, 2018, 10:00 AM UTC

FBISurveillance wrote: post #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.

Good to hear that it worked for you!

However, LASIK and similar approaches are not without problems when your vision is really bad (10 diopters or more), so I would recommend to inform yourself thoroughly before taking this step!

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

#14

Post by nils-m-holm » Sun, May 20, 2018, 10:03 AM UTC

wakeywakeywakey wrote: post #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? ;)

A white-on-black color scheme would go a long way!

That being said, in my experience HN is really one of the least problematic sites when it comes to accessibility! It even works fine with CSS off. Kudos to the designers!

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

#15

Post by mcjiggerlog » Sun, May 20, 2018, 10:07 AM UTC

On Android I've been using Hacker News Reader for years - https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.manuelmaly....

It's open source (https://github.com/manmal/hn-android/), works great and it has a bunch of accessibility settings. It's basically a read-only experience, though - no commenting.

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

#16

Post by y0ghur7_xxx » Sun, May 20, 2018, 10:07 AM UTC

Why don't you just zoom in? This seems so obvious to me that I am sure I am missing something.

I set the hn zoom level to 120%, and firefox remembers my zoom setting for the site so I don't have to set it every time.

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

#17

Post by sbr464 » Sun, May 20, 2018, 10:08 AM UTC

Curious why Cmd+/zooming doesn't work?

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

#18

Post by mike-cardwell » Sun, May 20, 2018, 10:10 AM UTC

The existing HN CSP policy allows inline styles. A bookmarklet which just does the following would work:

document.querySelectorAll('*').forEach(d => d.style.fontSize='20px')

I find it odd that mobile browsers don't allow you to set the font size like desktop browsers do.

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

#19

Post by mike-cardwell » Sun, May 20, 2018, 10:11 AM UTC

y0ghur7_xxx wrote: post #16

Why don't you just zoom in? This seems so obvious to me that I am sure I am missing something. I set the hn zoom level to 120%, and firefox remembers my zoom setting for the site so I don't have to set it every time.

On mobile Firefox, when I pinch zoom on HN, it means I end up having to constantly scroll horizontally to read anything. Maybe that's why?

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

#20

Post by xparadigm » Sun, May 20, 2018, 10:12 AM UTC

I set the zoom level to 130% in Firefox for this site only. It is persistant. I don't have to do it every time I visit the site. And it doesn't effect other sites.