5 ms·

Please consider making the UI respect the user's custom text scaling settings for accessibility. I'm not referring to DPI scaling but the TextScaleFactor value

Please consider making the UI respect the user's custom text scaling settings for accessibility. I'm not referring to DPI scaling but the TextScaleFactor value at HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Accessibility (see [1][2]) that users can set in Ease of Access > Display > Make text bigger. (Failing that, adding basic support for scaling text or UI via ctrl+plus/minus would be a huge improvement!) With the exception of Chromium/Chrome [3] this's been a persistent issue with Windows desktop apps from Google (most of these also use hard-coded control sizes making the problem worse). [1] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/apps/design/input/text-scaling https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/apps/design/input/... [2] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/uwp/api/windows.ui.viewmanagement.uisettings.textscalefactor?view=winrt-26100 https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/uwp/api/windows.ui.viewman... [3] https://issues.chromium.org/issues/40586200 https://issues.chromium.org/issues/40586200

johnh-hn 1y ago
I'm split with this. If it helps other people, then I'm all for it. But speaking as someone who is legally blind and makes extensive use of these settings, Windows 10 accessibility drives me mad. I'm waiting for fractional scaling to improve for Linux so I can make the switch. The problem with Make text bigger and Make everything bigger is they apply to every single application that supports them. Let's say I have two applications: A is comfortable enough to see and B isn't. If I change either of these settings to help me use B, A could now be a problem because it can take up too much screen real estate, which makes it unusable for a different reason. This doesn't sound like much of a problem until you have 5 or more applications you're trying to balance via these two settings. In reality, it's more complex than I'm describing because I may need to change both settings to help with a new application, which then means I have to continuously test every other application I use to make sure they're all somewhat comfortable enough to use. If an application I use updates to include support for these settings, I have to go through all this unplanned work again to try and make everything usable once more. It's frustrating. I know people make fun of Electron, but one major plus point for me is I have per application scaling when using it, and so it gives me better accessibility than Windows does by far. > (Failing that, adding basic support for scaling text or UI via ctrl+plus/minus would be a huge improvement!) I'd consider this to be a better option.
- BatteryMountain 1y ago
  Try Fedora with KDE. It has fractional scaling, per display. I set my laptop (1920x1080) to 120%, effectively making it 1600x900 but with very good physical size of things. I set my external panel (2560x1440) to 160%, effectively making it 1600x900 also. KDE even visualizes the two panels to be the same size. Ontop of these basic DPI settings, you can then tweak font/text even further. Its quite amazing. Windows cannot do custom dpi per monitor, only a single custom dpi that gets applied to all monitors. If you do go down the fractional scaling rabit hole, make sure whatever values you pick, both the height and width ends without any fractions after applying your custom dpi... that elimnates all blurs. In my example above, 2560/1.6 and 1440/1.6 gives nice round numbers, even though the operating systems typically only offer 100/125/150/175/200 etc. I built a small console app for myself that takes the resolution and tests all increments of 1% to see which resolution combinations gives values that don't end with fractions at the end. So it tells me which effective resolutions I will get at which % settings. Its awesome and made it so that I can easily make so that my laptop and external display has the same amount of space (or line of code) on the screen, even though they are different physical sizes.
  - johnh-hn 1y ago
    Thanks for detailed response. Do you happen to know if this is a recent change in Fedora/KDE? I tried somewhat recently, although I can't remember quite when that was. Gnome had experimental support for fractional scaling at the time but it wasn't good enough to switch to. > Windows cannot do custom dpi per monitor, only a single custom dpi that gets applied to all monitors. Yeah, support for custom DPI in general isn't great. I've been using https://www.majorgeeks.com/files/details/windows_10_dpi_fix.html https://www.majorgeeks.com/files/details/windows_10_dpi_fix.... for years to at least partially help. Edit: I think I answered my own question about how recent the change might have been: https://blogs.kde.org/2024/12/14/this-week-in-plasma-better-fractional-scaling/ https://blogs.kde.org/2024/12/14/this-week-in-plasma-better-... This seems to be just after I last tried. I'll give it another go, thanks BatteryMountain!
    - yndoendo 1y ago

johnh-hn 1y ago

I'm split with this. If it helps other people, then I'm all for it. But speaking as someone who is legally blind and makes extensive use of these settings, Windows 10 accessibility drives me mad. I'm waiting for fractional scaling to improve for Linux so I can make the switch. The problem with Make text bigger and Make everything bigger is they apply to every single application that supports them. Let's say I have two applications: A is comfortable enough to see and B isn't. If I change either of these settings to help me use B, A could now be a problem because it can take up too much screen real estate, which makes it unusable for a different reason. This doesn't sound like much of a problem until you have 5 or more applications you're trying to balance via these two settings. In reality, it's more complex than I'm describing because I may need to change both settings to help with a new application, which then means I have to continuously test every other application I use to make sure they're all somewhat comfortable enough to use. If an application I use updates to include support for these settings, I have to go through all this unplanned work again to try and make everything usable once more. It's frustrating. I know people make fun of Electron, but one major plus point for me is I have per application scaling when using it, and so it gives me better accessibility than Windows does by far. > (Failing that, adding basic support for scaling text or UI via ctrl+plus/minus would be a huge improvement!) I'd consider this to be a better option.

BatteryMountain 1y ago
Try Fedora with KDE. It has fractional scaling, per display. I set my laptop (1920x1080) to 120%, effectively making it 1600x900 but with very good physical size of things. I set my external panel (2560x1440) to 160%, effectively making it 1600x900 also. KDE even visualizes the two panels to be the same size. Ontop of these basic DPI settings, you can then tweak font/text even further. Its quite amazing. Windows cannot do custom dpi per monitor, only a single custom dpi that gets applied to all monitors. If you do go down the fractional scaling rabit hole, make sure whatever values you pick, both the height and width ends without any fractions after applying your custom dpi... that elimnates all blurs. In my example above, 2560/1.6 and 1440/1.6 gives nice round numbers, even though the operating systems typically only offer 100/125/150/175/200 etc. I built a small console app for myself that takes the resolution and tests all increments of 1% to see which resolution combinations gives values that don't end with fractions at the end. So it tells me which effective resolutions I will get at which % settings. Its awesome and made it so that I can easily make so that my laptop and external display has the same amount of space (or line of code) on the screen, even though they are different physical sizes.
- johnh-hn 1y ago
  Thanks for detailed response. Do you happen to know if this is a recent change in Fedora/KDE? I tried somewhat recently, although I can't remember quite when that was. Gnome had experimental support for fractional scaling at the time but it wasn't good enough to switch to. > Windows cannot do custom dpi per monitor, only a single custom dpi that gets applied to all monitors. Yeah, support for custom DPI in general isn't great. I've been using https://www.majorgeeks.com/files/details/windows_10_dpi_fix.html https://www.majorgeeks.com/files/details/windows_10_dpi_fix.... for years to at least partially help. Edit: I think I answered my own question about how recent the change might have been: https://blogs.kde.org/2024/12/14/this-week-in-plasma-better-fractional-scaling/ https://blogs.kde.org/2024/12/14/this-week-in-plasma-better-... This seems to be just after I last tried. I'll give it another go, thanks BatteryMountain!
  - yndoendo 1y ago