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Please stop disabling zoom

matuzo.at

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Re: Please stop disabling zoom

#71

Post by kenjackson »

rootusrootus wrote: post #33
PaulHoule wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately people see accessibility as a burden that a small minority puts on the rest of us, but really it is something that benefits everyone. For instance, normally sighted people or even people with "normal" nearsightedness, farsightedness, or presbyopia benefit from adequate contrast. Text "size" is another thing because people should be able to control it, particularly given the wide range of different devic…

> ... 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'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.

Re: Please stop disabling zoom

#72

Post by detritus »

Ansil849 wrote: post #62

I don't understand why the functionality exists for websites to dictate how users can and cannot view a page in the first place. This is like if you were reading a book that detected if you were trying to use a magnifying glass and immediately caused a glare to appear to prevent you from being able to read it. It is fucked up.

You don't understand why someone would want to create something the way they want to, really?

How much choice do you have in the typesetting of any book you've ever bought?

You could still use a magnifying glass on your monitor, as some Russian General was photographed doing recently... .

.

Obviously I think the choice to disable zoom, etc, is daft, but ultimately that is the creator's right to call, advisedly or otherwise.

Re: Please stop disabling zoom

#73

Post by kwhitefoot »

ascar wrote: post #53
tobyjsullivan wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Starting with a solution nobody asked for

At least one person wanted it: me.

Re: Please stop disabling zoom

#75

Post by ryandrake »

warning26 wrote: post #28
PaulHoule wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately people see accessibility as a burden that a small minority puts on the rest of us, but really it is something that benefits everyone. For instance, normally sighted people or even people with "normal" nearsightedness, farsightedness, or presbyopia benefit from adequate contrast. Text "size" is another thing because people should be able to control it, particularly given the wide range of different devic…

> Unfortunately people see accessibility as a burden that a small minority puts on the rest of us, but really it is something that benefits everyone Depends on the individual case — I’ve seen entire projects get scrapped because it wouldn’t be feasible to make an “accessible” version. Some things just aren’t work for everyone and that’s okay.

Accessibility is like performance, and security, and portability: You don't create the product, and then "spoon a little security in" right before shipping. You build it from the start as secure, with security as a first-class goal, and gate features on whether or not they are secure. Same for accessibility. You don't try to take an existing inaccessible project and wave a magic accessibility wand around it late in the game. It should be a first class design principle. If you are hiring a UI designer or interaction designer, pay attention to how seriously they take accessibility in their designs. If they're good, their designs are accessible by default, because as a Cousin Comment said, accessibility is not just "usable by the disabled" it's "usable by everyone".

Re: Please stop disabling zoom

#77

Post by err4nt »

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 watch for any dynamically generated `` tags and continue to remove them forever if they every show up.

While it's not ideal to have to use a snippet or an extension, you could fix this for yourself (or individual web users) in a way that 'fixed' literally every site on the internet for that person. So I wonder if that's a viable route to a solution!

Re: Please stop disabling zoom

#78

Post by PaulHoule »

peterkelly wrote: post #47
rootusrootus wrote: post #33

Earlier 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 ;-).

And they're using the very latest macbook pro with a fast and reliable internet connection, on which the site/app seems to work just fine and must therefore be ok.

It happens to everybody.

Circa 2008 I was working on a Silverlight RIA in a company that had MSDN subscriptions for everyone.

It worked just fine over the LAN off the server in our Ithaca office but when we demoed it for the people at the office in Rochester it took the application 40 minutes to boot because of all the round tripping.

That won me all the arguments I'd been having about excessive round tripping, getting that 40 minutes down to 40 seconds wasn't hard once those questions were resolved.

Re: Please stop disabling zoom

#79

Post by Johnny555 »

jeroenhd wrote: post #61
tobyjsullivan wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

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.

Re: Please stop disabling zoom

#80

Post by tbranyen »

Totally agreed for mobile websites, with the exception for PWAs and mobile sites that rely on specific view ports being unchanged, like games for instance.

With no scrollbars it's hard to tell if something is zoomed in or not and you might be missing parts of the UI without noticing. Native apps don't zoom and neither should mobile sites pretending to be apps. Build accessibility into the UI.

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