1604761 - Firefox doesn't apply gnome "Large Text" accessibility setting to web content

Status: VERIFIED FIXED

(Core :: Disability Access APIs, enhancement)

Description

[steverydz]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Ubuntu; Linux x86_64; rv:71.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/71.0

Steps to reproduce:

On Ubuntu I select the large text option from the accessibility menu because the text is too small for me to read otherwise.

Actual results:

In Firefox there was no change in font size but other applications respect this setting.

Expected results:

Firefox should have scaled in the same way that other applications do on Ubuntu when this accessibility setting is set.

Comment 1

[Clara Guerrero ( Need Info Brindusa Tot Please)]

Hi,

Thanks for submitting this bug to us!

I was unable to reproduce this issue on my end, I tried on Ubuntu 18.04.3 LTS with Firefox Nightly version 73.0a1 (2019-12-12) (64-bit). Are you setting the scale from preferences/displays? I've chosen a 200% scale and I can see the change reflected in any program, including Firefox. (or are you just scaling by using "ctrl" and "+" buttons ? )

Does this issue occur with a fresh profile as well? You can find the steps here: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profile-manager-create-and-remove-firefox-profiles?redirectlocale=en-US&redirectslug=Managing-profiles#w_starting-the-profile-manager

You can also try testing if the issue is reproducible in safe mode, here is a link that can help you:
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/troubleshoot-firefox-issues-using-safe-mode

Or you can also download Firefox Nightly from here: https://nightly.mozilla.org/ , to see if the issue still occurs there as well.

If after doing this you can still reproduce the bug, would you send a screenshot or a video of the bug?

Thanks in advance. I've already chosen a component for this bug in hope that someone with more expertise may look at it. We'll await their answer.

Best regards, Clara.

Comment 2

[steverydz]

(In reply to Clara Guerrero from comment #1)

Hi,

Thanks for submitting this bug to us!

I was unable to reproduce this issue on my end, I tried on Ubuntu 18.04.3 LTS with Firefox Nightly version 73.0a1 (2019-12-12) (64-bit). Are you setting the scale from preferences/displays? I've chosen a 200% scale and I can see the change reflected in any program, including Firefox. (or are you just scaling by using "ctrl" and "+" buttons ? )

Does this issue occur with a fresh profile as well? You can find the steps here: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profile-manager-create-and-remove-firefox-profiles?redirectlocale=en-US&redirectslug=Managing-profiles#w_starting-the-profile-manager

You can also try testing if the issue is reproducible in safe mode, here is a link that can help you:
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/troubleshoot-firefox-issues-using-safe-mode

Or you can also download Firefox Nightly from here: https://nightly.mozilla.org/ , to see if the issue still occurs there as well.

If after doing this you can still reproduce the bug, would you send a screenshot or a video of the bug?

Thanks in advance. I've already chosen a component for this bug in hope that someone with more expertise may look at it. We'll await their answer.

Best regards, Clara.

Hi, thank you for looking into this and getting back to me.

The issue isn't when I select the display scaling, it's when I scale the text. So my screen is set to 200% and that is fine but when I enable large text Firefox doesn't apply these changes.

Here is a video which hopefully explains what I mean: https://rydz.co/firefox_font_scaling.webm

Thank you

Comment 3

[Emilio Cobos Álvarez (:emilio)]

Yes, that video was great, thanks. Relatedly, I don't think we honor the high contrast setting, and we probably should.

Morgan / Jamie, do you know if other platforms have similar "large text" settings? If so, do we hook it to the text-only zoom, or to regular scale-factor zoom?

If not, do you have a preference?

Comment 4

[Morgan Reschenberg [:morgan]]

(In reply to Emilio Cobos Álvarez (:emilio) from comment #3)

Yes, that video was great, thanks. Relatedly, I don't think we honor the high contrast setting, and we probably should.

Morgan / Jamie, do you know if other platforms have similar "large text" settings? If so, do we hook it to the text-only zoom, or to regular scale-factor zoom?

If not, do you have a preference?

I don't know of any other platforms that have this user-facing option (at least, don't remember seeing it on my windows machine, and can't find it on my mac). I think there are maybe two separate things to handle here:

• Scaling the display (100% to 200%) should probably apply to regular scale-factor zoom if it doesn't already scale at the OS level. Hard to tell if Firefox is "larger" after this option; chrome looks like its content is a bit bigger, but could be a marginal difference. I'd like to see the difference between 100% and 200% "scaled" though to know for sure if we have to do anything here.

• Increasing the text size by enabling larger text should probably do font scaling/text zoom since semantically this option only deals with text.

Re: HCM, you're probably right. Something to consider for 1593273

Comment 5

[Emilio Cobos Álvarez (:emilio)]

(In reply to Morgan Reschenberg [:morgan] from comment #4)

• Scaling the display (100% to 200%) should probably apply to regular scale-factor zoom if it doesn't already scale at the OS level. Hard to tell if Firefox is "larger" after this option; chrome looks like its content is a bit bigger, but could be a marginal difference. I'd like to see the difference between 100% and 200% "scaled" though to know for sure if we have to do anything here.

Yeah, that already happens.

• Increasing the text size by enabling larger text should probably do font scaling/text zoom since semantically this option only deals with text.

Cool, that was my intuition, but good that it matches yours ^.^

Re: HCM, you're probably right. Something to consider for 1593273

Should be pretty trivial to do, I think... I could give that a go.

Comment 6

[Morgan Reschenberg [:morgan]]

(In reply to Emilio Cobos Álvarez (:emilio) from comment #5)

(In reply to Morgan Reschenberg [:morgan] from comment #4)

• Scaling the display (100% to 200%) should probably apply to regular scale-factor zoom if it doesn't already scale at the OS level. Hard to tell if Firefox is "larger" after this option; chrome looks like its content is a bit bigger, but could be a marginal difference. I'd like to see the difference between 100% and 200% "scaled" though to know for sure if we have to do anything here.

Yeah, that already happens.

• Increasing the text size by enabling larger text should probably do font scaling/text zoom since semantically this option only deals with text.

Cool, that was my intuition, but good that it matches yours ^.^

Re: HCM, you're probably right. Something to consider for 1593273

Should be pretty trivial to do, I think... I could give that a go.

If you're up for it feel free :) Happy to review. I think #c17 is probably the most helpful in terms of where the bug discussion ended up.

Comment 7

[Emilio Cobos Álvarez (:emilio)]

(In reply to Morgan Reschenberg [:morgan] from comment #6)

If you're up for it feel free :) Happy to review. I think #c17 is probably the most helpful in terms of where the bug discussion ended up.

Well I meant hooking the gnome settings, which right now are not hooked at all. They'd behave like the windows ones, which I don't plan to change behavior of for now.

Comment 8

[Morgan Reschenberg [:morgan]]

(In reply to Emilio Cobos Álvarez (:emilio) from comment #7)

(In reply to Morgan Reschenberg [:morgan] from comment #6)

If you're up for it feel free :) Happy to review. I think #c17 is probably the most helpful in terms of where the bug discussion ended up.

Well I meant hooking the gnome settings, which right now are not hooked at all. They'd behave like the windows ones, which I don't plan to change behavior of for now.

Haha gotcha, thanks. If you have access to a machine, could you list how many colours you're able to choose as a user in the HCM OS settings, and what their headings are? We need to change the way we do colour inheretance for 1593737, and I don't wanna forget to think about linux again.

Comment 9

[Emilio Cobos Álvarez (:emilio)]

Attachment: Bug 1604761 - Do not round away font-scaling accessibility settings in GTK. r=stransky,karlt

I'm not quite familiar with the history of this code, but Gnome a11y settings
set the scale to 1.25 (which gives 120dpi). We were rounding it away, which
seems quite unfortunate.

Comment 10

[Emilio Cobos Álvarez (:emilio)]

I filed bug 1604761 with a patch for high contrast.

I dug a bit into the font scale factor and it seems it should work auto-magically, but we were rounding it away here. That sucks a bit :(

Fixing that gives me nice, large fonts. It uses effectively the device scale factor rather than text-only zoom, but I think that's what other browsers do as well so seems reasonable.

Comment 11

[Karl Tomlinson (:karlt)]

I assume bug 1554850 is the reason why https://rydz.co/firefox_font_scaling.webm does not demonstrate a change in Firefox UI fonts. (A restart is required to detect the change.)

Comment 12

[Pulsebot]

Pushed by [e-mail]:
https://hg.mozilla.org/integration/autoland/rev/8fe4738543cb
Do not round away font-scaling accessibility settings in GTK. r=stransky,karlt

Comment 13

[Razvan Maries]

https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/rev/8fe4738543cb

Comment 14

[Clara Guerrero ( Need Info Brindusa Tot Please)]

Hi everyone,

I tried verifying this fix, thanks for the video @steverydz. I followed the correct steps this time, and I am able to replicate it both in last nightly version v74.0a1 (2020-01-07) (64-bit) and the previous one where it's said to be fixed 73.0a1 (2019-12-31). Steve, can you check if the bug is still happening to you?
Thanks! Best,
Clara

Comment 15

[Emilio Cobos Álvarez (:emilio)]

(In reply to Clara Guerrero from comment #14)

Hi everyone,

I tried verifying this fix, thanks for the video @steverydz. I followed the correct steps this time, and I am able to replicate it both in last nightly version v74.0a1 (2020-01-07) (64-bit) and the previous one where it's said to be fixed 73.0a1 (2019-12-31). Steve, can you check if the bug is still happening to you?
Thanks! Best,
Clara

You need a restart, fwiw. See bug 1554850. But I'm pretty sure this is fixed, as I use Gnome myself :-)

Comment 16

[steverydz]

Thank you so much! I've just checkin in 73.0b2 and the issue is definitely fixed there.

Comment 17

[Clara Guerrero ( Need Info Brindusa Tot Please)]

Hi ,

Thanks for confirming this issue has been solved on your end.

Regards, Clara

Comment 18

[James Teh [:Jamie]]

(In reply to Emilio Cobos Álvarez (:emilio) from comment #3)

Morgan / Jamie, do you know if other platforms have similar "large text" settings?

Windows has "Make text bigger" in Settings -> Ease of Access -> Vision -> Display:
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/uwp/design/input/text-scaling
I have no idea how to retrieve this programmatically in Win32 apps and couldn't figure this out with some brief searching. Note that this is distinct from "Make everything bigger" which adjusts DPI.

If so, do we hook it to the text-only zoom

I agree with Morgan that we should hook this to text-only zoom.