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Please stop disabling zoom

matuzo.at

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Re: Please stop disabling zoom

#141

Post by blippage »

jraph wrote: post #60
nightski wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think this is reality. There might be some truth to it, but in my opinion the real problem is the platform itself. I'm going to blame it on browsers and web standards. The web was not designed with accessibility as default. Instead it is a significant amount of work to make things accessible. Every project incurs huge cost in order to achieve it. I truly believe from an accessibility standpoint the web is sim…

What? It seems to me the web is accessible by default. Write a plain old HTML page and everybody should be able to read it (assuming they have a computer to open it or a printed version). People go out of their ways to mess this up by using fancy colors, fancy web fonts, messed up JS (frameworks), non standard components because it's cooler, disabling outlines, and so on. Do you have examples where the Web is not acc…

Yep. Just write in HTML, and the browser will render everything for you. It's almost as if the browser treated HTML as if, I dunno, it was some kind of markup language, you know, with hypertext, and stuff, and could automatically render it. /s

I remember back in the late 90's, and we decided to create a static website for internal use on a project. Everything was supposed to be quick and simple. We weren't after anything fancy, just something that worked.

We used Microsoft's whatever-it-was-called at the time for writing webpages. It turned out that the html produced required some special Microsoft fonts for the web.

Hells bells. The whole point of the Internet is interoperability. But no. We can't have that, can we Microsoft? We need special fonts. Interoperability? Screw that!

About the same time Java on webpages was a thing. We never used them, but I had seen sites that had. So the site had to download some Java craplet, whatever it was called, you had to enable it, plus of course you had to have Java.

Even when the web was still young, people had some really dumb ideas.

Then there was a fad that sites had to have some kind of animated intro on the front page. I remember seeing one for my bank and a recruitment site. No doubt that cost them a pretty penny.

Those early internet fads have died out, but today's websites are no better.

Why does my browser have to download fonts? I already have fonts! Just use one of those!

Anyway, that's me done. I'm off to shout at some clouds. Not the virtual clouds, actual real ones.

Re: Please stop disabling zoom

#142

Post by soheil »

First I thought this is Zoom the video conf software; please, stop using easily misinterpreted wording.

Then I realized on iOS since about 6 years ago disabling zoom via meta tags takes no effect and you can still zoom; please, stop being lazy and not do your research before complaining.

Finally I realize on android and desktop this is still an issue but maybe those sites have valid reasons like they want the page look exactly as they intended for aesthetics or even in some cases functional reasons; please, stop assuming developers are just lazy and obviously want to annoy people with disabilities.

Re: Please stop disabling zoom

#143

Post by pjerem »

agust wrote: post #88

What's the rational for not wanting websites and web apps to disable zoom, and not complaining about all native apps doing it? Would these people want to be able to zoom in native apps as well? Or is there a reason it's fine in native apps but not on the web?

You threw web apps and web sites in the same bucket. The problem is just that : websites are not apps and should be zoomed as you wish.

Re: Please stop disabling zoom

#144

Post by ludamad »

polotics wrote: post #120
kenjackson wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've become "that guy" in presentations who constantly tells people "fonts too small", "can't read cause the contrast isn't enough", etc... My hope over time is that I stop being invited to meetings or people actually take the time to fix their presentations before it is presented to a wider audience.

A simple rule: Minimum font size >= Age of oldest attendee

I think if you applied this literally it'd be pretty patronizing ;)

Re: Please stop disabling zoom

#145

Post by godot »

"width=device-width, initial-scale=1, user-scalable=no" seems like basically a setting that some tutorial had once posted many years ago, and all responsive sites just blindly took it as gospel; because it was supposed to give you one unified view for your site on mobile.

Understandably, back in the days (and maybe still the case now) the default behavior for web browsers on mobile were to load the same desktop site but zoomed out -- it wasn't a great experience, so devs looked for a way to avoid it.

I think it's fine to build a mobile responsive site with "width=device-width, initial-scale=1" (that gives you a default view that is built for mobile) but there is little reasons to have "user-scalable=no".

Re: Please stop disabling zoom

#146

Post by jnovek »

Johnny555 wrote: post #79
jeroenhd wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The goal isn't to help the readers though, it's to convince web developers to fix their websites. Anyone can find the secret override setting if they're motivated, but that's not a solution to the problem. I know web developers don't care, but they're still the ones that can actually solve the problem. It's possible that like many other abused web features, Google will eventually change the setting for this feature f…

The goal isn't to help the readers though, it's to convince web developers to fix their websites. It seems like that battle is already lost, this isn't some default setting that they are just accepting, web developers are doing it because they think they have a good reason, some random blog post isn't going to change their minds.

For those of us with disabilities, this is every situation of our lives all the time.

The disadvantage of being disabled doesn’t come from the way that disability limits us as much as it comes from the countless ways it makes all the normal things people do slightly harder.

Advocates fight to change these things not because it’s easy to do but because eliminating at least some of the hurdles in life makes our overall experience a little easier.

Re: Please stop disabling zoom

#147

Post by agust »

pjerem wrote: post #143
agust wrote: post #88

What's the rational for not wanting websites and web apps to disable zoom, and not complaining about all native apps doing it? Would these people want to be able to zoom in native apps as well? Or is there a reason it's fine in native apps but not on the web?

You threw web apps and web sites in the same bucket. The problem is just that : websites are not apps and should be zoomed as you wish.

And what distinguish them exactly...? And why would disabling zooming be fine for one but not the other?

Re: Please stop disabling zoom

#149

Post by madeofpalk »

FinalBriefing wrote: post #125
_fat_santa wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Almost all major template for JS frameworks these days include that line. And there are tons of guides that specify adding that in. I get why it's there, if you're building a PWA that is supposed to mimick a mobile app, you have to enable that to override some annoying mobile browser behaviors like zooming on an input. The problem is that the above scenario is about the only time you would want to set the viewport in…

That's not true. They might include the tag, but I haven't seen one disable zooming by default.

A lot of this is because iPhone just no longer obeys the user-scalable tag any more, precisely because of this.

Re: Please stop disabling zoom

#150

Post by tomrod »

amluto wrote: post #2

It’s not just accessibility. I’ve last track of the number of times I’ve seen a mobile website with a table that extends past the right side of the viewport and zoom disabled. You can’t scroll, and you can’t zoom, so you can’t read the table.

Wikipedia comes to mind for this!
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