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Ask HN: Is non-adjustable mobile font size a real problem?
I find myself simply passing on sites/articles where I cannot adjust the font size on mobile. Care to take a guess on the percentage of sites that users choose not to read due to non-adjustable mobile font size? I'm getting the sense that a signficant portion of ones userbase is being ignored and alienated with sites that do not have pinch-zoom functionality. If this is the case, then it's fairly low hanging competitive fruit to enable this kind of functionality.
- byg80 11y agoI feel the same way. The problem is that it's just random ones it selects, leaving other fonts tiny and some massive.
- meeper16 11y agoYes, all things considered, I'd say providing the ability for consistent font size increases on mobile will correspondingly provide an increase in ones userbase or readership.
- lnanek2 11y agoNot sure what you are referring to, but that sounds like a symptom of the web developer setting absolute sizes for some fonts (12px) vs. relative ones (medium).
- cma 11y agoThe old default android browser was so much nicer than Chrome in this area; you zoomed in until it was comfortable, then double tapped and the text, not the whole page, would reflow to fit horizontally.
- Daneel_ 11y agoI would say the average designer assumes that users will punch-zoom in to see text in more detail. The only sites that irritate me in this regard are the ones that don't let you pinch-zoom. Full disclosure: I have great eyesight, so there isn't a font size too small for me on mobile browsers - the limit is what the screen can display. I sympathise with users with imparied vision, but I'd still claim that pinch-zooming is the generally-accepted answer.
- Cyph0n 11y agoReally now. Open HN in a mobile browser and tell me you don't have to squint to read at the default zoom level.
- mullsork 11y agoHN is a bad example seeing as the maintainers refuse to put in the small amount of effort it would take to make it work decently on mobile.
- joshuapants 11y agoI think the way conversations thread would be pretty hard to do comfortably on mobile
- frou_dh 11y agoSurely this should be solved in a single place (the browser) rather than asking every site to implement their own plus & minus buttons. MobileSafari offers text size adjustment when in the article reading mode (via the paragraph icon at the left of the address bar), but that mode is only offered based on some heuristic.
- RobotCaleb 11y agoI miss the first Android browser's ability to reflow text as you zoomed. I hate zooming in to read, but having to scroll left and right as well as down.
- ricardobeat 11y agoLately the major issue I've seen is font size being too big on landscape orientation, when portrait looks fine. That when the content is not already covered by stupid top/bottom fixed bars that were only designed for portrait mode.
- jschwartzi 11y agoIt's not just you. Everyone's mobile site seems to choose font sizes that are readable from across the room on my 5.5 inch phone. I'll quit reading articles that do this. I'm starting to collect a list of hostnames I won't visit because the text is too big to read comfortably on my phone.
- Quanttek 11y agoThat's why I'm using Firefox's reading mode more and more. It'll get the content 95% of the time right and the typography is just gorgeous
- realusername 11y agoI also really recommend Firefox's readability mode (with the book icon), it works really really well and I'm using it all the time !
- irq-1 11y agoFirefox still needs a minimum font size, or font scaling like Chrome has.
- mixmastamyk 11y agoMin font size has been in since early Netscape... or are you talking about something else?
- tajen 11y agoIt is a problem. And you know the worst? There are "mobile" libraries like Zapto (=jQuery) which enable touch features at the expense of zooming. I didn't check the details, but the sheer idea of blocking zooming on a mobile device is plain stupid.
- beerbajay 11y agoZepto?
- 3pt14159 11y agoThis frustrates me as well. The problem is that some interactions aren't possible or performant if zooming is allowed.
- tgb 11y agoWhy is that the case?
- bpicolo 11y agoMany mobile browsers have a ~300ms mobile touch delay unless you disable zooming (because they wait to see if it's a double-tap zoom event). iOS is the biggest issue with this now, as I think Chrome on android better listens to some new directives to not wait
- mort96 11y agoI think with iOS, even if you disable zooming, you still get that 300ms delay. A better solution would be to instead of listening to only click, listen to both click and doing interesting things with ontouchend. I recall implementing something like that a while ago, where when an element is touched (ontouchstart), I saved the X and Y coords of the touch, and when the user releases their finger (ontouchend), if the finger hasn't moved more than say 32 pixels, I fired the callback to whatever. Of course, you also need to do something to prevent triggering the event twice, but when done correctly, you get both nice quick click events and zooming.
- anabis 11y agoI have to do "see PC version" then do pinch zoom.
- tim333 11y agoI have a problem too. I've reached the reading glasses stage and have problems with small text. I was actively looking for a solution recently, something like the Readability or Clearly extensions which work well in Chrome on the laptop but I failed to find anything like that for the iPhone. I was considering trying to make my own app to do it with the idea of using Phonegap/Javascript to read the html for a site and then process it in a Clearly type manner. I'm not quite sure if that would work? I think cross site ajax requests don't work in most browsers (http://stackoverflow.com/questions/15005500/loading-cross-domain-html-page-with-jquery-ajax http://stackoverflow.com/questions/15005500/loading-cross-do...) but I vaguely recall they did work when I tried them from Phonegap on the phone.
- TD-Linux 11y agoThe Firefox for Android app has a reading mode. Hopefully it will arrive with the Firefox for iOS app as well.
- rmetzler 11y agoMobile Safari has "reader view" build in for most sites, but it doesn't work on every site. It works on most blogs and news sites though. You can find the button left from the URL.
- 2muchcoffeeman 11y agoDesktop Safari processes the page to try and identify if there is a block of text that might look like prose. If it finds it, you get the button. If it can't, you don't. I assume mobile Safari does something similar.
- cycomachead 11y agoYep, it's an algorithm site authors have no control over. It's definitely useful, but not something to rely on as a dev.
- Kerlix 11y agoI do most of my iPad web reading through an RSS reader like Mr. Reader because of a similar issue. Mr. Reader lets you choose between 5 built-in (including normal web view) page views as well as allowing unlimited user created/added bookmarklets, javascripts & URL Schemes. An iOS add-on that would flip any Safari page to a customizable Reader/Readability/Clearly view would be nice, though.
- applecore 11y agoAnother problem is when a non-zoomable mobile site makes it impossible to view a list of thirty items at once; instead, you get just a few items in your viewport and you have to scroll incessantly to browse the page.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- meeper16 11y agoLooks like we might see a major shift in functionality, adoption and competition in the wings for the mobile space.
- krzyk 11y agoYeah, I really hate github that is doing this to their mobile page. I have to sometimes switch to desktop version to get zoom functionality (and some others, that are missing from mobile version)
- arthurcolle 11y agoFork functionality is notably missing from mobile...
- JosephRedfern 11y agoHonest question: how often are you going to fork and then develop software from a mobile phone?
- robterrell 11y agoNot the OP, but I often discover interesting github projects when browsing HN on mobile and would like to star the project (basically, a bookmark) or even fork it (if I think I'll want to make code changes and possible send a pr). Has happened a couple of times in the past week.
- JosephRedfern 11y agoAgreed. Starring seems important and useful - but I can't imagine that many people fork and then develop from a mobile phone... but I'm probably wrong :)
- arthurcolle 11y agoWell, allow me to retort - I frequently check HN and GitHub from my phone and try to fork projects for later cloning and hacking, and have to "view desktop mode" to fork, so... yeah, pretty often!
- cycomachead 11y agoSame as the above, but i have actually pushed code changes from the Github web UI before. I at least appreciate that github gives this option.
- whoopdedo 11y agoThere are a lot of accessibility problems in mobile devices. No large fonts. No high contrast mode. And have you ever watched someone with unsteady hands try to touch a button without it being interpreted as a swipe or double-touch?
- SixSigma 11y agoYep, instantly closed
- jy133 11y agoHow do you think about the OS accessbility zoom features?
- cpncrunch 11y agoThey're pretty terrible, at least on Android. The latest stock android browser doesn't have have a text zoom option, and the text zoom features in chrome or firefox don't really work reliably.
- jraines 11y agoWhat sucks is Android used to be good, at least in a lot of cases. I don't know how much this generalizes, but on Hacker News I used to be able to pinch to zoom, then double tap the screen and the site would wrap at the zoomed size. This went away somewhere around Ice Cream Sandwich, not sure exactly.
- jakub_g 11y agoNote that Chrome on Android has a "force enable zoom" setting in Accessibility panel while Opera for Android (which uses Blink engine, same as Chrome) has reflow-on-zoom support (called "text wrap" in settings). On Windows Phone there is a system-level setting "ease of access > allow zooming on all web content". This basically solves the issue for me. I browse almost exclusively using Opera.
- jakub_g 11y agoFor curious souls, Chrome on Android sometimes supports reflow out of the box, depending on vendor. Apparently vendors like to set different flags in browsers to differentiate themselves from each other. HTC is one of those who ships Chrome with reflow on zoom enabled. It is a bit battery draining to recalculate stuff each time a user zooms hence it's not enabled by default. *(according to research from Peter Paul Koch from his Mobile web handbook)
- justinc387 11y agoIf you create a bookmark with the following URL, it will allow you to override the zoom setting on any site (at least on iOS): javascript:document.querySelector('meta%5Bname=viewport%5D').setAttribute('content','width=device-width,initial-scale=1.0,maximum-scale=10.0,user-scalable=1');
- cycomachead 11y agoDear lord. This is so simple and a great idea, even if it temporarily breaks a few sites! THANKS!
- lcswi 11y agoI rarely see sites where I cannot zoom in. Many do not let me zoom out though. Instead, they display what feels like 4 words per line.
- stephenboyd 11y agoFrom reading the comments here, it's definitely not just you. But it's not a problem for me on my recent Samsung Galaxy. I actually prefer sites that don't delay to wait for a possible double-click. And accidentally resizing is a hassle because then I have to limit my thumb/finger movements to straight vertical lines, or else I'll end up scrolling horizontally as well. When I had a smaller phone, I used a Dolphin browser, which reflowed text as well as resized fonts when I double-tapped. I thought that was fine. But if the default pinch/doubletap behavior is to zoom the whole page like Chrome does, I'd rather not deal with it.
- lastres0rt 11y agoThe worst is when some sites resize certain components but not others, making them painfully small. The most vivid example is Reddit's text resizing but the actual interactive points of the site (like arrows and replying to comments) are tiny as hell. (Of course, it is Reddit, so it's not like anything of value is lost...)
- grogers 11y agoFont size can definitely be annoying, although it hasn't bitten me very often - usually you can pinch to get a decent enough size. Far more frequently for me is the header bar that stays pinned to the top or bottom of the page while scrolling instead of being at a fixed position. I'm not going to read a long article with only 60% of my already tiny screen. I've even seen sites that try to mimic the behavior of the address bar where if you scroll down it disappears but if you scroll up it pops back in. I've never once clicked on anything these header bars have to offer except by mistake...
- allendoerfer 11y agoAs many noted, disabling pinch-/doubletap-zoom results in faster click events. It is hard to implement a scaling function if you designed your page using absolute pixels as units. With relative font-sizes (em,rem,vh,vw,wmax etc) you could just change the (absolute) font-size of the body tag to resize everything else. Scaling would then be easy to do in with a little JavasSript, a plugin or by just honoring the default body font-size the browser set. The problem is, that using em makes your styles more complex. They are difficult to use, because ems are relative to the parent element for font-size and to the element itself for other attributes. If you define a font-size in em for an element you have to know, where you are going to put this element on the page. Define the font-size for a list, put a list inside a list and you messed up your design. Unfortunately the other relative units are not as well supported, so most websites just use pixels. Many websites use the Bootstrap framework these days and Bootstrap uses pixels, too. Here is a discussion about the topic in their issue tracker: https://github.com/twbs/bootstrap/issues/1943 https://github.com/twbs/bootstrap/issues/1943 Ultimately their solution is to drop IE8 support and use rem, which is relative to the body font-size, in version 4. I look forward to that. While people could still mess up the scaling by adding their own absolute font-size declarations, Bootstrap websites will then default to being easily scalable.
- kstrauser 11y agoSure is. Not for me, but I met a guy the other day who is already nearly blind and getting progressively worse. He uses an iPad to make 1-inch-high fonts so he can make out the character shapes, and said he wants to hang onto reading with his eyes as long as he can before switching to speech. I can read teensy text (although with my astigmatism not so easily as when I was 20), but my acquaintance can't. He seemed like a cool guy and I'd hate to see him disconnected from the resources I enjoy.
- bphogan 11y agoPeople are disabling zooming because it causes a delay, which is in turn caused by developers trying to make HTML act like native apps. Articles on the web should not be JavaScript heavy. HTML is responsive and zoomable by default. It takes a few thousand lines of JavaScript and CSS to make it hard for people to read. It just boggles my mind how much of the web is static content embedded in some whiz-bang JavaScript framework. It's static content. Serve it from static files you generate, let hyperlinks just be hyperlinks, and get on with your day. :) /grumpy low vision user is grumpy.