1325871 - Add ability to force scrolling fixed/absolute containers "out of view" or hiding them, to facilitate reading text on not-tall screens

Status: NEW

(Core :: Layout, enhancement)

Description

[Dan Jacobson]

Attachment: oo.jpg

https://01.org/linuxgraphics/forum/graphics-power-users/set-video-color-saturation-xrandr-problem
is an example of a webpage designed for tall monitors.

When instead viewed on wide monitors the user can only scroll a small
portion.

There should be a way for the user to force the whole page to scroll, be
it holding down some additional key whilst scrolling or whatever (not
only for disabled users, but for the general public too.)

Comment 1

[Dan Jacobson]

By tiny I mean about half the web page, in contrast to the whole web page on other sites.
Even less on other monitors.

Comment 2

[Dan Jacobson]

The effect is like we are in a claustrophobic cave with a low ceiling.
So low we have to stoop to walk.

Comment 3

[Dan Jacobson]

Opening the page with various Page Inspector programs alters the behavior of the page due to the window size having changed, so all bets are off...

Comment 4

[MarjaE]

A set of one-handed solutions would be more accessible. Users should be able to scroll any site using the keyboard, or using the mouse, without having to be able to use both at once.

Comment 5

[:Gijs (away/busy until Mar 10)]

This is a badly designed site.

We *are* letting you scroll the entire site. The site has defined certain bits as 'fixed', meaning they're always present at the same position in the viewport independent of how you scroll said viewport. That's a CSS feature.

I don't know if there's a sane way to define behaviour about what should happen to these fixed containers to get rid of the 'claustrophobic' effect - for the top banner, changing position:fixed to position:absolute would help, but for the bottom one, that would mean the footer will hang about in front of the text if you scroll down, which is also not what you want.

Of course, we could hide everything that's in a :fixed container... but I don't know how to make an undiscoverable shortcut work better. I'm tempted to suggest this should be INVALID because there isn't really a lot of things a UA can do here.

Verdi, do you have any clever ideas?

Comment 6

[Kartikaya Gupta (email:[e-mail])]

(In reply to Dan Jacobson from comment #3)
> Opening the page with various Page Inspector programs alters the behavior of
> the page due to the window size having changed, so all bets are off...

Note that you can pop the devtools out into a separate window (one of the icons along the top does this) so that it doesn't interfere with the window size.

(In reply to :Gijs from comment #5)
> Of course, we could hide everything that's in a :fixed container...

This is sounding a lot like reader mode. Can we just allow enabling reader mode on pages like this?

Comment 7

[:Gijs (away/busy until Mar 10)]

(In reply to Kartikaya Gupta (email:[e-mail]) from comment #6)
> (In reply to :Gijs from comment #5)
> > Of course, we could hide everything that's in a :fixed container...
> 
> This is sounding a lot like reader mode. Can we just allow enabling reader
> mode on pages like this?

Only if reader mode is able to produce usable contents on such a page, which isn't necessarily the case. :-(

Comment 8

[Botond Ballo [:botond]]

Not sure if this is helpful for the particular page at issue (which seems to have moved since the time the bug was filed), but one context in which you can scroll fixed elements offscreen is with pinch-zooming. After pinch-zooming in (requires a touchpad or touchscreen), the visible area, called the "visual viewport", is a subset of the "layout viewport" (the part of the page that was onscreen before zooming). Fixed elements are attached to the layout viewport, so by scrolling the visual viewport within the layout viewport in that state, fixed elements can effectively be scrolled.

(This effect is illustrated in the demo on this page: http://bokand.github.io/viewport/index.html)