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Please stop disabling zoom

matuzo.at

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Re: Please stop disabling zoom

#291

Post by account42 »

manholio wrote: post #105
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.

Another maddening thing are tiny fonts on mobile devices and pinch zoom does not reflow text. So you can't read without zooming in, and you can't see the whole page when you do, so you need to put your phone in landscape mode and drag left and right to read each and every row.

This is mostly due to the broken by default rendering of mobile browsers that emulate a larger desktop browser window unless the website specifically opts into the sane responsive behavior via the tag. This is especially idiotic since mobile browsers now have an explicit desktop mode that forces this behavior.

Re: Please stop disabling zoom

#292

Post by account42 »

toper-centage wrote: post #208
_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…

Fun fact: the reason why browsers sometimes zoom in on an input is because the input's font size is too small, less than 16px, which is considered not accessible. So it's ironic that to counter that behaviour some people make the page even less accessible by disabling use zoom.

To be fair, I don't think the current implementation of auto-zoom, at least in mobile Firefox, actually makes things more accessible. The zoom it choose is ridiculous so you lose all context (and often can't even see the whole input element) and the screen constantly jumps around when filling out a form.

Re: Please stop disabling zoom

#293

Post by extra88 »

agust wrote: post #193
detaro wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Websites have that ability, both in CSS with types that are defined relative to the users set font size, and to detect it in JS. The platforms capability is not the problem here.

Hmm really? How do you do that? The `rem` and `em` CSS units do not reflect iOS font-size settings if this is what you mean (I don't know about Android).

It's true that mobile Safari seems to lack a setting for default font size or what Mac Safari has, a minimum font size setting.

It does have a default Page Zoom setting and it will remember Page Zoom changes per-domain (e.g. I have this site set to 115%).

There is a way for web sites to make use of iOS's Dynamic Type setting [0] to make text larger, but it's up to each site's author to include the requisite values in their CSS.

[0] https://www.interactiveaccessibility.com/blog/text-resizing-...

Re: Please stop disabling zoom

#294

Post by account42 »

mc4ndr3 wrote: post #59
rhema wrote: post #39

My mother-in-law has severe eye problems and MS type symptoms. 16 years ago, I showed her how ctrl shift +/- could make her fonts huge. This one tip that is not obvious to most folks improved and continue to improve her quality of life _drastically_.

Increase at OS level, instead of having to repeat this step manually for every app and website.

These days, setting a higher DPI system-wide is the best solution. In 2006 it probably was not.

Re: Please stop disabling zoom

#295

Post by account42 »

err4nt wrote: post #77

It should be fairly straightforward (1 line of JavaScript required to actually get the job done) to make a user-script, or even a browser extension that obliterates any offending ` ` tag like this. Something like: document.querySelectorAll('meta[name="viewport"][content*="user-scalable=no"]').forEach(tag => tag.remove()) And if you wanted to get really fancy, you could use window.setInterval or a Mutation Observer to…

Wouldn't this remove the meta tag entirely and thus completely disable responsive rendering on mobile browsers, reverting to emulating a larger viewport.

Re: Please stop disabling zoom

#296

Post by account42 »

Anaminus wrote: post #65

Vision: Game Boy Advance-sized website. Problem: Very tiny. Solution: Scale to viewport in integer increments. Result: https://anaminus.github.io/ This disables zoom. In fact, it actively fights the zoom level to always fit the viewport. Have I committed a great sin?

> This disables zoom. In fact, it actively fights the zoom level to always fit the viewport. Have I committed a great sin?

Yes. Scaling to the screen size is fine, overriding the users's attempt at zooming in is not.

Re: Please stop disabling zoom

#297

Post by account42 »

Mordisquitos wrote: post #130
shahmeern wrote: post #54

I actually prefer it when sites have zoom disabled on mobile. It's very jarring having the entire viewport zoom in on input elements on focus.

The simple solution for that would be for mobile browsers to provide an quick toggle to disable zoom.

Or to just not have crappy autozoom on input elements in the first place.

Re: Please stop disabling zoom

#298

Post by tombert »

nicbou wrote: post #274
tombert wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have decent eyesight post-LASIK, but I have a lot of trouble reading small text. I almost always read books in large-print if it's available, and the Kindle has been a godsend for this particular reason. I've been tested for dyslexia and I don't have it, I just have a weird brain that has trouble with small text. 95% of the time this is a complete non-issue for me, since my monitor (for home and work) is a 50" 4k T…

Hey, this is an issue I'd like to work on. My eyesight is good but not as good as before, and it made me reconsider my font and contrast choices on allaboutberlin.com. I find myself zooming a lot more too. Can you tell me what you think of the font sizes? Is it readable enough? Is there room for improvement?

I'll say that that it's fairly readable immediately, but I did find myself zooming to 170% in Firefox.

I'm not a designer but I don't think it looks terrible at that percentage, and I personally found it a bit more readable.

Re: Please stop disabling zoom

#299

Post by synthecypher »

Not sure why this became a trend my guess is back when everyone was trying to update their website to support mobile devices, they want to deliver an 'app-like' experience and as native apps don't let you pinch zoom the native UI wherever you like and mobile sites followed suit.

I guess the issue now is it has become part of the cargo cult with people including these meta tags in their base templates without knowing what it does and failing to implement a suitable layout for all mobile device screen sizes and DPIs.

https://github.com/h5bp/html5-boilerplate/blob/main/src/inde...

Re: Please stop disabling zoom

#300

Post by chunkyks »

MrBuddyCasino wrote: post #14
chunkyks wrote: post #7

But then the website might not look like the designer's glistening perfect vision, that only ever worked properly in their browser on their desktop in the first place.

The reason this is done is to get rid of extra latency when processing user input. I guess detecting zoom gestures needs some time to distinguish them from normal clicks?

Presuming you are correct:

* Some number of people are sensitive to latency

* Some people are unable to read my website

You're gambling that there are more people who would walk away due to latency, than there are who would walk away due to being unable to interact with your site at all.

Personally I suspect that to be a poor tradeoff.

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