Please stop disabling zoom
matuzo.at
matuzo.at
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”
Without zoom disabled 5 people putting their fingers on a screen looks a lot like a pinch gesture. Disabling the default event handlers only works some of the time.
This is a common problem with the web, we can't have nice things because people use them poorly.
Pro tip: Double tap for a few more options.
I've never been able to zoom on mobile apps.
At least one person wanted it: me.
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 from "override website zoom settings" to "respect website preferences for zooming" with "off" as a default.
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.
Bringing this to developers' attention might very well be enough to get tons of people to remove the zoom block from their websites.
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.
I think it cultivates a healthy mindset though: At an early age, you learn that all assymetric tools were designed by idiots, so by kindergarten, you're already questioning everything.
I suspect this is why lefties are drastically overrepresented in leadership positions, NASA, etc.
Source: https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2015/beyond-bls/left-versus-rig...
According to the research, “lefties are generally born with a different brain structure that negatively affects their social and cognitive abilities.”
I really like this line of thinking because I think abled people are often overwhelmed by the prospect of disability. I bet left-handedness is the sort of impairment that people can get their head around as a starting point.
I’ve tried using my vision impairment (which requires a low to moderate level of support) to describe the same thing, but peoples’ eyes tend to glaze over as soon as I say “amblyopia”. :-P
Then you have learned the wrong lession. Assymetric tools might not be inclusive, but they are generally designed that way because it brings some kind of advantage.
The entire article barely scratches 250 words. I don't think anything can be considered 'buried' in what is basically a medium-sized paragraph.
In lieu of that, maybe consider having an "accessibility options" cta on first interaction.
For not disabling zoom the header does not even help because developers blindly copy pasting the <meta name="viewport" ...> line so that broken by default mobile browsers won't fuck up their responsive design are not going to handle that header.
Like many accessibility issues, zoom is not something that only benefits a subset of the popultaion. The solution is to no disable zoom for anyone except the 0.01% of pages (only very specific web apps really) where zoom does not make any sense AND interferes with some other behavior (e.g. multi touch).
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.
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 devices that are out there.
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.
For example, take buildings -- they typically have stairways, often as a fire escape route. However, stairways are not usable by everyone. Should we ensure that buildings have no stairways at all because there exist some people who can't use them?
To apply this analogy to web accessibility, consider WCAG 2.5.5 Target Size -- in order to pass, click targets must be 44px by 44px. Seems reasonable right? Try designing a desktop spreadsheet program with 44x44 click targets. It's basically impossible to do in a way that doesn't severely impair the design for people who can click smaller targets.
Extremes are always unreasonable, the goal should be to support everyone that you reasonably can. Nobody is telling anyone to make their tools work for the blind deaf and mute quadruple amputee - but that does not mean that it should be acceptable to completely ignore the variations in capability of people wanting to use your product.
> To apply this analogy to web accessibility, consider WCAG 2.5.5 Target Size -- in order to pass, click targets must be 44px by 44px. Seems reasonable right? Try designing a desktop spreadsheet program with 44x44 click targets. It's basically impossible to do in a way that doesn't severely impair the design for people who can click smaller targets.
Blindly following guidelines leads to problems, yes. But you can achieve the goal of making the spreadsheed usable for someone who has trouble with small click targets: For a desktop program you should consider adding efficient and discoverable keyboard navigation so that noone needs to click anything. This will help power users as well as those with fine motion problems. In general, a program, unlike a physical staircase, is also something that can dynamically adapt to the needs of the user. For example you could make your spreadsheet zoomable. For a desktop program it could be OK to rely on third-party (or platform-provided) zoom utilities - just don't write your program in a way that makes those impossible to use.
For buildings such dynamic adaption is not as feasible and so we make compromises that require some people to rely on others for help in incommon situations. But even there we should do what we resonably can - for in many parts of the world public buildings do have wheelchair-accessible entrances these days, even if the emergency exit is a stair.
A staircase isn't accessible, but still allowed. The accessibility is in an alternate implementation provided for those who need it.
A phone call is an accessible alternative to a website. US law says that the phone call must be offered at the same price as the website, for those who need it.
Exactly this -- some things just aren't going to be for everyone. If we truly wanted to make buildings "accessible", all stairways, and even printed signage would have to be banned, as there exists someone who cannot benefit from it.
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 ;-).
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 simply broken. So sure, blame it on young programmers. But that's a poor excuse for where we are at today in my humble opinion.
This has got to be satire right? HTML is accessible by default, it's your horrible JS SPA frameworks that break thid. See [0]
I haven't perceived maintaining accessibility to be a big burden in the long term.
Interestingly the accessibility project forced me to raise my game on CSS/HTML, graphic design, etc. and probably had a bigger impact on my side projects than it did on my work.
Now multiply this times every web app in existence and the cost is quite large. A lot of this could be avoided with a better platform.
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, <div> 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.
IF don't fight it and if you respect semantics and progressive enhancement / beautiful degradation. You get so much by default: legible colors and font sizes, tabbed page navigation, alt texts, clickable labels, zoomable interface...
When you embrace the platform and its spirit, you get accessible results quite easily. But not a lot of people seem to embrace it. Many people seem to think "what to do for what I want to see" instead of "what to do for what I want to mean", and you lose if you do this. You need to get your meaning right and then decorate it carefully. You should not paint first. But that's probably not a web-specific issue.
What's more, building accessible things may make you gain time, by having a robust basis. It's not always a cost.
There are native UI frameworks where this is not nearly as big of an issue.
Too much freedom perhaps? Should you even be able to give a div an onclick handler?
What about inputs? Why do developers have to make custom inputs because the core ones are severely lacking? That's where accessibility goes wrong. Because core functionality is terrible and needs to be augmented with richer functionality (but terrible from an accessibility perspective).
There is something fundamental about this platform that does not naturally encourage good behavior. All you have to do is look at the evidence.
As an dumb little example, it's not even obvious that making a div a button is bad unless you know that it is. The platform doesn't guide you at all. It has an onClick handler the same as a button. Little attempt is made to differentiate the two from an API perspective.
I could give countless other examples, but I think I have demonstrated what I am getting at.
> Because core functionality is terrible and needs to be augmented with richer functionality
Well, yes, I agree with both of these points. I think I get your point in the end, and your examples are convincing.
I'd say the web platform is accessible by default but this is easy to break inadvertently and maybe not the ideal platform to build applications because despite its strong accessibility features, it's lacking for what we want to do with it today.
HTML being a format to write documents first and not applications probably does not help neither.
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.
Frontpage, I'm going to bet. :)
I was an early user of Frontpage, shortly after Vermeer released it. A few months later, it was bought by Microsoft. Looks like Frontpage was absorbed and discontinued (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_FrontPage).
It was handy but I was just messing around with a very simple personal website and most of the time I'd just use Notepad or something like that.
>About the same time Java on webpages was a thing.
Guilty... I wrote a simple java applet to draw a polar plot of antenna radiation patterns. Later I added a calculator applet - after all, how handy would a simple calculator only a website away be?? I should have gone with the trends and converted both to javascript... but I did not.
>Then there was a fad that sites had to have some kind of animated intro on the front page
I remember the omni-present "site under construction" animated gif. As in, > 50% of websites had them somewhere.
Follow the link in this article (https://www.vice.com/en/article/9akenz/this-guy-compiled-eve...) for an eye-bleeding collection. Haha!
Yes. That sounds right.
It is on my mind because one of my hobbies is a cyberphysical artsystem that has a small book of design rules and presbyopia is what sets the limits on feature size. (You can't just tell people "hold the card closer")
https://gen5.info/$/XQ*42RXF-TLY:$B.8/
and is made of 8″x8″ cards. That's the first constellation I made, most of the output is either stand alone 4″x6″ cards or constellations. I'm working now on my third constellation from images published by Ukraine's MoD.
I've been dragging on my feet about blogging a manifesto for the three-sided cards, first because the system was changing by the day (it was a big thing for me to realize I could eliminate paper jams by printing the back side first) and then because I found hugo is good for anything except things that involve quantitative thinking or artistic sensibilities. I am still looking for a static site generator that's the equal of the subjects I want to blog about.
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.
In the hands of a lot of people though Powerpoint is a tool for insulting the intelligence of the whole room.
If you want to understand without attending a presentation then what you want is a paper, or book. Those are very different formats.
I've given many presentations where I has to provide the slides, which were then repeatedly emailed as samizdat. Easy 10x as many people only read the slides, but a document would not have reached them at all.
It all depends on your audience.
Manager wanted to add a ton of content that they felt would be helpful. I said sure, and added it to an appendix with arrows, callouts, additional definitions, etc.
I then presented it to the CxO group -- we only discussed that first slide. I emailed the deck, and got comments back saying that the appendix was confusing but they loved how simple and clear the single non-appendix slide was.
I've always tried to follow the 4x4 rule: no more than 4 lines, and no more than 4 words per line. I've found icons and occasionally diagrams can be helpful in explaining more abstract concepts. Also, slide notes are used liberally.
One place I worked was veeery similar to what you describe here. PPT was considered docs of record since no one wanted to make formal memos and have those enter the control system. My approach had friction, since I would be extremely concise and direct people to the slide notes if they had questions. In this org, people were notorious for lifting slides from others decks for their own presentations (hence I would distribute as PDF to discourage this) since people would not field questions those slides might raise.
Just like native apps do...?
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Learn/CSS/Building_...
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-...
Browsers are native apps, so they already do that for websites.
From time to time people complain and say I need to "get with it", but not a single person has complained they couldn't read them from the back of the room!
Makes me think of the oxo good grips kitchen utensils. They were designed designed for people with poor dexterity and as a result have become easier for everyone, this has made them extent l extremely popular
The irony is you have to work to get this to not work. HTML by default will render just fine. Developers just can't resist customizing it so it doesn't work.
My web sites use plain HTML as much as possible. They're derided for being "Web 1.0", but they work, load in a flash, can be resized by the user, are legible, etc.
Even Apple went with pages that were light grey text on white with a tiny font. My eyeballs would just hurt trying to read it. This was a few years ago, maybe they fixed it, but I grew to avoid reading Apple's online docs because it was literally painful.
But it frustrates me to no end that a browser is no longer a "User" Agent and is now just seen as a... virtual machine for apps?
One tip: Don't try to install too many general filtering extensions (uMatrix, Privacy Badger, uBlock Origin, etc...) at the same time because they will end up fighting.
My addon list isnt that big either... it's just that I disable a lot of things as well, like webGL and other stuff. Suprising number of sites needlessly use these things.
Follow https://github.com/tridactyl/tridactyl/issues/2712 if you want updates when that's added. It would help if you could link to the website that hijacks ctrl-f in that issue :)
Even better, one chrome issue/bug report, had google devs on the tracker explaining how it's fine, and how each website should just fix things.
They were blathering on about how websites are broken, should be fixed, utter absurd.
The sheer, unmitigated gall, of saying "screw users" is beyond comprehension.
Google: unless you want another series of Professor Farnsworth posters around HQ, fix it!
What is SO effing hard about drawing within the screen on web?! I can't tell you the number of times I've seen this issue. Just the other day I saw reddit's sign up form is totally broken on iOS, you have to swap between landscape/portrait multiple times and hope whatever garbage layout engine it uses redraws the button inside the screen.
I expect it's fairly rare for the employer of a web designer to give a shit what the site looks like on a phone, which means the designers don't give a shit either.
I see this "we can't afford to test on different resolutions" excuse with games that completely break for anything that is not 16:9 a lot. Don't target a fixed size. Don't target a fixed aspect ratio. Don't target a set of aspect ratios. Make your application responsive - you don't need different devices to test that responsiveness.
[0] https://firefox-source-docs.mozilla.org/devtools-user/index....
But, as you've noticed, with more complex UI (especially modals and toolbars fixed to the screen) it becomes more important that things are built to fit horizontally and vertically. It's not necessarily hard but it does take more thought to work out how things will shrink, grow, scroll, etc.
It’s because the web’s layout primitives don’t compose well. There’s no easy way to say “this is a full-width container and nothing inside it can go off screen.” As an obvious example, any descendant of that container can use fixed positioning and do whatever it wants. But there are subtler examples that are easier to fall victim to. The way to fix this is to built your own higher-level layout primitives and have conventions or tooling to enforce that you compose them only in approved ways.
overflow: auto;
Fixed positioning is you explicitly opting out of composability.
> The way to fix this is to built your own higher-level layout primitives and have conventions or tooling to enforce that you compose them only in approved ways.
No, the way to fix it is to look at your DOM and CSS instead of adding more abstractions with broken edge cases on top of your abstractions.
As soon as you put real data into a website, especially if the website is a CMS that you've handed-off to a _non-technical_ client, it's going to overflow every pretty, grid-based box.
For example if you're making a WebGL app, or if you're making a map zooming widget that needs to progressively load more local detail as the user zooms in on an area.
If you don't disable zoom, the OS and your zoom logic will be fighting over the pinch gesture.
Which makes the table content inaccessible. It _is_ an accessibility issue.
Here's the definition I prefer, that does not focus on "disabilities" (which many people equate "accessibility" with):
> When we say a site is accessible, we mean that the site's content is available, and its functionality can be operated, by literally anyone.
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=no" they came with is not a good idea.
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 way. Yet because the line gets included in boilerplates to make it easier to make PWA's, it ends up in a ton of stuff that definitely is not a PWA and should not have that.
<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1">
Do you have links to examples of the major templates?
Yep, I've seen some people disable zoom in their webpages specifically to prevent Safari from auto-zooming all over the place as the user moves from this to that input. It gets really annoying if you have anything but the simplest form. And what webpage doesn't have at least one form on it, even just the search box?
I fully agree with OP that disabling zoom is wrong. I also think it's wrong for browsers to mess with the zoom level without the user's instruction.
Almost every weird workaround we still have today in webdev was originally written to compensate for inconsistent browser implementation of some standard. In the past, IE was the one that always did something weird. Now it's Safari. Until browsers stop trying to pretend that they know better than both the developer and the user, somebody somewhere will keep writing these workarounds that then stick around in boilerplates and tutorials for years.
I don't think browsers or users are really the problem. Browsers are paving cattle paths. Users are stuck with what they get.
Developers on the other hand. They're the ones who insist on using a document markup language to describe and build user interfaces.
The manager doesn't want that annoying autozoom. The designer doesn't want to change the font size or page layout. There are also edge cases where something that was supposed to be 16px ends up being slightly smaller because of unit conversion and Safari zooms anyway. The developer, tired of this bullshit, googles a solution to satisfy everyone.
Fortunately, there's yet another workaround for developers stuck in this situation. Drop "maximum-scale=1", but keep "user-scalable=no" in the meta viewport tag. Safari will ignore the directive and allow the user to zoom freely, but this somehow disables zooming on inputs. Makes sense, huh?
One browser implementing a non-standard feature that doesn't even work consistently eventually hurts everyone, including the developer and the user. Just blaming the developer misses the larger problem.
Copy-pasting a template and just not being aware of accessibility and functionality requirements is most likely explanation here. Or devs being given 4k UHD monitors and never looking at their work on a small laptop.
I really want an internet where servers provide structured content, but where I control my user experience.
Because server owners have the freedom to publish whatever they like (within the bounds of the law) and design their sites however they wish. An internet on which servers are only allowed to provide "structured content" would be significantly less free and open.
You may be interested in the Gemini Protocol[0], on which sites are built according to that general principle.
The vast majority of users would prefer not to have to write an entire layout and stylesheet for each site they visit, nor would they consider having all sites conform to a single layout or style to be of any value. It's only very small minority of people (probably exclusive to HN) who would prefer the web was nothing more than JSON or raw bitstreams.
But again - geminispace works the way you want. Gemtext doesn't use stylesheets and only has very basic markup. Everything is dictated and controlled by the browser. And the protocol is specifically designed such that writing a client for it is easy.
This seems so obvious and yet so many technical people miss this entirely.
Most people most of the time just want a solution, they don't want the tools to solve their problem on their own terms.
Even if sites just spat out data sets in JSON, there'd still be someone bitching it wasn't in XML/CSV/whatever.
I don’t think this would be a reasonable way to put user preferences ahead of website owners/designers, this seems more like replacing the web with something else entirely.
What I am taking about is not requiring users to be more technical or do more work, precisely the opposite. Make their lives as easy as possible, and design the browser from the perspective that the user is king/queen, and you literally don’t give a shit about the web designer or their business model. If what they want the site to do is incompatible with maximising user happiness, tough luck, the browser should ignore their code or markup.
Good examples of features (some) browsers incorporate which do some of the job without requiring technical knowledge, most of which should IMO be on by default:
- preventing autoplay of videos and audio
- the flag to force enable Zoom
- reader mode
- blocking ads and or trackers
- etc.
I’d love to see much more of it, and enabled by default.
Because the most popular web browsers ARE created by some of the largest server owners (i.e. Google).
To address this, make sure your site works with simple browsers, like Links and lynx.
Browser scrolling works fine. You don't need to try to re-implement smooth scrolling, it never works and makes my scrolling bounce around like mad.
One website override my scrolling speed entirely. I like it so that 1 click = 2 lines of scrolling. That site changed it to that 1 click = 1/2 line, but for some reason the web dev thought they knew better than my preferences.
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.
Disabling or otherwise inhibiting user behavior is not a creator's right.
Ultimately, that's the creator's mistake to make and it's incumbent upon the end-user to read the content as they can, if they must.
I'm not sure why people believe they have a right to dictate how someone else's content is created.
I guess I'm more talking about individuals here, not organisations, but I think the problem lies more in individual's websites.
I do not believe anyone here is at all believing that they have a right to dictate how someone else's content is created. The argument is about modification, not creation. People should absolutely have the ability to modify their local version of the content to make it readable to them.
For whatever reason, my Firefox was already ignoring these artificial restrictions intended by the creators, and I was able to zoom as normal. Does that affect the creators of these websites in any way whatsoever?
To use your book analogy - the web is no longer a bunch of books on a shelf, it's an AR device that shoots lasers into your eye. The net effect may be the same in many use-cases, but not necessarily, and malicious actors now have far more flexibility and power because we've all become accustomed to running random code we download off the internet with a single click.
I am, obviously, not a huge fan of this shift and think a large majority of sites could operate perfectly well under the "markup document" model without needing actual code-execution privileges, or more than a minimal set of code-execution privileges for those actual simple document-related use-cases. Go back to being mostly just a book, basically.
Almost all of the use-cases that javascript gets used for in a document context could really be replaced by navigation between sets of linked, static pages (perhaps embedded where needed) - boy, what an idea. If you delivered a site "as a gzip" then there should barely be any noticeable size difference from that anyway, especially compared to downloading mountains of JS embeds.
The amount of things that truly, truly need interactivity is pretty low - things like chat clients come to mind, but does your bank need to be running javascript on your end? Probably not.
Edit: Having just tried the sites in the Safari ... they zoom in just fine with that set, so .. Im a bit confused
1. There must be a meta tag of type viewport 2. The viewport must be defined to have width=device-width 3. The content must be at a scale of 1
Heck, back when I bought my mother her first iPad, this was the whole reason. She was getting eye surgery and wouldn't be able to see well, and would be stuck face-down for a couple weeks. I figured an iPad would be good, because she could pinch-zoom so the letters were two inches tall if necessary. It was a roaring success, but zoom=false defeats that.
Mobile Safari does ignore this setting. You have to go out of your way with stopping touch events on mobile safari to prevent zooming.
Sometimes this is problematic for sites using "small" (< 16px) fonts for input fields because that will cause mobile safari to zoom in to show the input field whether you want it to or not.
I posted this 11 years ago: https://tech.bluesmoon.info/2011/01/device-width-and-how-not...
It's not a trend, it's been around as long as it's been possible. Site owners dislike letting their users have control.
As per theories in this thread why this meta tag is so popular. I know a few UX designers who explicitly asked the web developers (also me) to disable zoom so that there precious design could not be broken by users. I simply refuse to do so.
Doing God's work.
Is there a good way to get lightning-fast response times to tap events without disabling zoom in 2022?
Latency matters a lot and everyone taps, not everyone zooms.
a, button, .etc { touch-action: manipulation; } document.querySelectorAll('meta[name="viewport"][content*="user-scalable=no"]').forEach(tag => tag.remove())
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!
* 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.
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".
Reading the article I was surprised to hear of the issue and could not replicate. I am capable of finding the relevant setting in Android I'm sure, but many older and tech illiterate people in my life (who are more likely to need zoom) I think would struggle.
here's a very simple SPA like page
https://decisive-spiral-blue.glitch.me
It's just an upper and lower vertical flexbox. fixed size toolbar on top, the rest is a textarea. Click in the text area. type "A"<enter>, "B"<enter>, "C"<enter> etc... and watch the cursor disappear below the virtual keyboard. WTF!
I've seen other issues where the browser auto-zooms when clicking in a textarea and while they are trying to be helpful they actually make the site practically unusable. Both because info the user needed is now offscreen and because finishing the input doesn't auto-unzoom so the user is left having to manually adjust to see the page again.
And then, there are random rules (like if the text is larger than 16px it might not auto-zoom). Might. AFAIK there is no spec that says "hey, don't auto-zoom" so your left with random hacks to try to make the site usable. (of course if the user wants to zoom that's fine)
The point is, the mobile browsing experience sucks by default and devs do the best they can to try to work around how much it sucks. They choose wrong but they wouldn't be reaching for solutions if the default experience wasn't so bad in the first place.
I'd personally like to be able to opt in to a mode where when the virtual keyboard appears the browser's size changes and I can fix my layout for the new available size via CSS media queries.
This is somewhat ironic because, if memory serves, the original reason people started adding this to their HTML was because of some dubious scaling behaviour on iOS Safari (I think, if you didn't disable zooming, Safari responded to rotation by zooming the page to fill the new width, rather than laying out the page again).
Had a chuckle.
Me: "ABSOLUTLEY!"
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.
Note: I can't test this right now because I don't have any sites that do this particular bad thing
There are some other accessibility tricks that Firefox advertises [3] like ignoring website font and color choices.
Firefox also has native support for overriding website CSS [5] but "modern" websites often come with impossible to understand DOM and CSS structures (if they even use CSS and not just forcefully insert style into the DOM directly because separation of concerns is for losers I guess).
Then there are websites like Github and some shitty forum software that insist on hijacking keyboard shortcuts like Ctrl+F and Ctrl+K. You can go into about:config and set permissions.default.shortcuts to 2 (Services.perms.DENY_ACTION) to block websites from overriding shortcut settings by default. You can go into the site settings and manually enable them again by going to page info (ctrl+i), then tabbing over to permissions, and changing the value for "override keyboard shortcuts" from "default" to "allow". Or, you could simply block the websites that offend you from that screen without changing the default.
[1]: https://www.codeinwp.com/snippets/disable-right-click-contex...
[2]: https://codepen.io/impressivewebs/embed/zYYxepW?height=265&t...
[3]: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/accessibility-features-...
[4]: https://superuser.com/questions/318912/how-can-i-override-th...
I agree I have fat fingers but 8 our of 10 times, I end up opening up the ad. :(
Absolutely everything that isn't default browser zoom is broken. It's the wrong speed, or cuts at the wrong place. Basically it's always surprising in an annoying way.
Then there's the "frustratingly slow scroll to navigate". E.g. go to https://cloud.google.com/compute/all-pricing and click on the last nav on the left.
AND of course it doesn't support zoom because almost no native apps support zoom. (Why do they get a pass?)
USB Power Delivery Rev. 1.0 (V. 1.0) 2012-07-05 100 W (20 V, 5 A) USB Power Delivery Rev. 1.0 (V. 1.3) 2014-03-11 100 W (20 V, 5 A) USB Power Delivery Rev. 2.0 (V. 1.0) 2014-08-11 100 W (20 V, 5 A) USB Power Delivery Rev. 2.0 (V. 1.1) 2015-05-07 100 W (20 V, 5 A) USB Power Delivery Rev. 2.0 (V. 1.2) 2016-03-25 100 W (20 V, 5 A) USB Power Delivery Rev. 2.0 (V. 1.3) 2017-01-12 100 W (20 V, 5 A) USB Power Delivery Rev. 3.0 (V. 1.1) 2017-01-12 100 W (20 V, 5 A) USB Power Delivery Rev. 3.0 (V. 1.2) 2018-06-21 100 W (20 V, 5 A) USB Power Delivery Rev. 3.0 (V. 2.0) 2019-08-29 100 W (20 V, 5 A) USB Power Delivery Rev. 3.1 (V. 1.0) 2021-05-24 240 W (48 V, 5 A) USB Power Delivery Rev. 3.1 (V. 1.1) 2021-07-06 240 W (48 V, 5 A) USB Power Delivery Rev. 3.1 (V. 1.2) 2021-10-26 240 W (48 V, 5 A)
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...
Some corporate training long ago had "I can't see videos" and "I can't hear things" toggles that were not mutually exclusive.
If you set it to "Hellen Keller mode", you could just read the training at your own pace. It was glorious.
Thank you, accessiblity advocates!
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?
To be honest, It makes me recall painful WAP[1] browsing on an old Nokia phone.
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[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_Application_Protocol
Yes. Scaling to the screen size is fine, overriding the users's attempt at zooming in is not.
In the same vein, if you use images on your responsive website, consider linking to the full size version.
I would buy this if they downscaled everything before storing it; that would actually make sense. But it seems like they just want to "curate" your "experience"?
In Firefox, Shift-right always presents the browser context menu. It's one of the few distinguishing features they haven't screwed up yet.
95% of the time this is a complete non-issue for me, since my monitor (for home and work) is a 50" 4k TV and I just abuse the zoom-in feature in Firefox and I'm good, but when the site actively disables zooming, it feels like an almost directed attack towards people like me: Tombert need not read this website.
Can you tell me what you think of the font sizes? Is it readable enough? Is there room for improvement?
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.
After installing this, I’ve had a much better experience with the web on iPhone and iPad. And I less often have to switch to a laptop to get around some user-hostile site.
[0] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/stopthemadness-mobile/id158308...
I taught him the nearly universal ctrl mouse wheel hotkey combo so that he can scale things, and then proceeded to adjust about a half dozen different areas in the various applications he uses for managing jobs and ordering parts.
I would never pull someone down to sit down to my eye level if in a wheelchair, never.
I would never pull someone closer to me so I can read lips better.
And certainly I would never remotely pull them to something that I want, as in this case, digital remote camera.
However, it is a courtesy to ask them to adjust for your sake. And only a courtesy.
This OP dude needs a proverbial slap across the face.
Just ask, curtly and nicely.
Would you mind explaining what you mean by asking others to adjust for your sake in the context of mobile web accessibility? I'm having trouble connecting it to the content of the article. I'm not the writer, but would love to better understand your point of view here.
I had thought it was about allowing other people to play with the gimbal and focus and that kind of “zoom” … of a remote camera variety. My bad.
Still, asking others to adjust is a nice thing. Demanding to do things on their end, not so much.
I used to get into terrible arguments with a business partner about every web page I made. He'd say "the text is too big" or "the text is too small" and I'd point out that you shouldn't ever complain about that because you can use Ctrl + and Ctrl -.
I am thinking about UIs that work across desktop and mobile and would love to make peace with the scaling issues once and for all.
But if I remember correctly the correct way to prevent this was to set the font-size of the input field to at least 16px.
EDIT: More infos: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2989263/disable-auto-zoo...
One of the worst offenses for me is when the website dynamically resizes everything so that zoom “works” but a split second later everything goes back the way it was. I would also like browsers to have a quick/accessible workaround for that behavior too.
I disable it because there are bugs on mobile browsers where inputs can automatically hijack zoom and the default behavior really messes up the workflow. But yea you have to reimplement or replace it with a flow for your use case.
It's just one click to remove it for form-based websites (a few steps to whitelist if you're going to use that web form a lot), but the readability for the vast majority of websites is drastically improved.
One of my other pet peeves is web sites that shrink the default text size. Why??? I set my browser and OS to a text size that is useable for me, please defer to me, your user.
Thanks muchly.
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?
There are very legitimate and valid reasons to disable page zooming: it can break layout, it can be triggered accidentally causing usability issues because content then overflows, and it is a poor solution to increase text readability as you often then have to scroll to read a full line of text.
Not allowing to do it is not the solution.
Web app = interactive application Website = readable content
If needed you may disable zooming in your web app because it could break your application’s user interaction.
You have no reason to disable zoom on any "content" page because the possible interactions are basically scrolling and clicking links.
>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”
OMFG, thank you.
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.
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.
In all cases, I can zoom all elements (text, images, the works) just fine, up to 500%.
Firefox 100 on Windows. Is this just another one of those "Safari on IOS is broken, so the Web is broken" things, or is there more to it?
I'm otherwise with the article, and also for old IT updating their terms.
On an unrelated note, why is HN text so small? I understand if it were a hunting site, where you're naturally supposed to use a scope, but for an IT forum that's unusual, given half of us wear glasses!
The bigger problem is when posts are printed with a 50% grey font on top of a 25% grey background. Like it's such an obvious usability issue that I have no idea why the developer who set it up didn't have a little laugh at their own expense for the mistake the first time they saw it and then immediately went back and fixed it. Why it it still like this in 2022?
How about: "Please, stop preventing mobile users from using the zoom function"
There's another angle here, which is that being pro-browser zoom is anti-web application, and implicitly preferring native applications.
This is actually playing into Apple's hands of enforcing their walled garden and the Apple tax. They are neutering web apps intentionally.