While we are at it: please stop changing the right mouse button in my browser. I‘m looking at you MS Teams. If you want to have context menus in your app, that’s ok, but please don’t put them in the browser. You break important use cases for me and other people.
Please stop disabling zoom
51–60 of 309 posts
Re: Please stop disabling zoom
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
> ... a small minority ... presbyopia ... I think what you just indirectly pointed out is that software is largely written by young, ignorant people who don't appreciate that everyone will get to experience presbyopia, and it happens sooner than you think. Maybe we should require product owners to be at least 40 years old ;-).
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…
> 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.
This has got to be satire right? HTML is accessible by default, it's your horrible JS SPA frameworks that break thid. See [0]
Re: Please stop disabling zoom
#53Yes it is silly. The article actually ends with some useful tips: As a user, you can force allow zooming: In Firefox find the settings, select “Accessibility” and activate “Zoom on all website” In Chrome find the settings, select “Accessibility” and check “Force enable zoom”
I kind of wish the author had lead with this instead of burying it at the bottom. For whatever reach the article gets, this is the part that's going to offer value to readers (it seems unlikely this article will sway a significant number of web developers to change their habits).
I dunno. This article is like a 2 minute read. Starting with a solution nobody asked for sounds like an unreasonable request, while I did like hearing about these options after realizing how big the problem is.
Re: Please stop disabling zoom
#54I 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.
Re: Please stop disabling zoom
#55We used to disable zoom, out of a sense of "our site doesn't need you to zoom", and partially because of cargo culting. Everybody just pasted the same meta tag everywhere.
In the end, it's nobody's business but their own whether they zoom or not, so why would I disable it?
We re-enabled zoom.
Re: Please stop disabling zoom
#56My pet theory: I'm pretty sure this is because when HTML5 became a thing, some major tech blog showed us what an HTML5 page would look like (simplified doctype, meta charset) and they included the viewport settings that disabled zoom. Then pretty much everyone copied from these guides, and here we are. I remember I had used HTML5 skeleton templates for a while before I learned that the "maximum-scale=1, user-scalable…
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…
Interesting. I've seen the meta tag for the viewport for PWAs, but they don't usually prevent zooming. Most commonly I've seen:
Do you have links to examples of the major templates?
Re: Please stop disabling zoom
#57It’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.
What mobile browser? On iOS Safari, all the example websites mentioned by the OP allowed me to zoom. I guess Safari doesn’t allow zoom to be disabled by websites? Maybe all browsers should work this way?
I use iOS Firefox, because I love desktop Firefox and I have Firefo set up with account sync across all my devices. But there's a feature of desktop Firefox which isn't available on the iOS version: remember zoom setting for a domain.
iOS Firefox does have pinch-to-zoom, but having to use it every time I navigate to a page is tiresome.
iOS Firefox is a small niche choice and not the same codebase as desktop Firefox because Apple requires that you use their rendering engine. So I'm not sure it makes sense for Mozilla to dedicate the kind of resources to it to implement all the features I might want, and I don't have a lot of gripes. But as a datapoint in this thread, zoom is really important to me, and I miss it when it's not available. I shake my head every time I visit Google search results on my iPad because the text is so tiny.
Re: Please stop disabling zoom
#58FWIW, I can zoom on all of the listed example sites using the pinch action on an iPad. (My eyesight is poor, and this is something I do often to read small text.) Is this something that’s dependent on the browser?
As this post mentions at the bottom, Safari ignores this and allows zoom on all websites, and Firefox and Chrome have opt-in settings to ignore this.
Re: Please stop disabling zoom
#59My 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.
Re: Please stop disabling zoom
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
> ... a small minority ... presbyopia ... I think what you just indirectly pointed out is that software is largely written by young, ignorant people who don't appreciate that everyone will get to experience presbyopia, and it happens sooner than you think. Maybe we should require product owners to be at least 40 years old ;-).
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 accessible by default, apart from the by default unlimited line width which is easily fixable with one line of CSS?
Sure you need to use the right markup for the right things (and, no, is usually not the right element for building a button or writing a paragraph, there are dedicated tags for those) but I can't see a way to avoid this.