1845917 - Setting the font size above 100% from the browser settings fails to work

Status: NEW

(Firefox :: Disability Access, defect)

Description

[Raul Bucata]

Environment:
Operating system: Android 11/ Android 12
Firefox version: Firefox Nightly 117.0a1 (2015964835-🦎117.0a1-20230727034425🦎)

Steps to reproduce:

1. Navigate to the settings option of the browser.
2. Tap on the "Accessibility" tab.
3. Disable the "Automatic font" option
4. Adjust the "Font Size" option from 100% to 200%.
5. Navigate to: https://www.primcast.com/radio/pricing/
6. Observe the result.

Expected Behavior:
The text on the page is adjusted to the font setting.

Actual Behavior:
The page is zoomed in.

Notes:

• Reproducible regardless of the status of ETP.
• Reproducible on the latest build of Firefox Nightly and Release.
• Reproducible if the "Automatic font sizing option" is enabled and the font size option is altered from the device.
• Works as expected using Chrome.
• Observed on multiple pages.

Comment 1

[Raul Bucata]

Attachment: 20230728_145913.mp4

Comment 2

[Eitan Isaacson [:eeejay]]

Marking this as access-s2 because this is indeed an accessibility issue. The fact that this works on Chrome tells me that this is a browser bug and not a web authoring issue.

Comment 3

[Olivia Hall [:olivia]]

Emilio, do you know if this is related to the browser.display.os-zoom-behavior pref?

Comment 4

[Emilio Cobos Álvarez (:emilio)]

(In reply to Olivia Hall [:olivia] from comment #3)

Emilio, do you know if this is related to the browser.display.os-zoom-behavior pref?

Yes and no. Some of the bug reports here are older than that behavior change. Regardless of how you zoom, some websites are potentially broken when you zoom in the page with either text or full zoom.

(In reply to Eitan Isaacson [:eeejay] from comment #2)

Marking this as access-s2 because this is indeed an accessibility issue. The fact that this works on Chrome tells me that this is a browser bug and not a web authoring issue.

Can you elaborate? It seems to me that Chrome doesn't change the website text size in response to OS settings. There is a separate setting in Chrome, which when used seems to do something weird / inconsistent (as in, it scales up some kinds of text but not other).

Comment 5

[Emilio Cobos Álvarez (:emilio)]

So, IMO, there are two (or three) questions here:

• Is "automatic font sizing" in settings the right default? It seems other browsers require you to opt into this behavior. Maybe we should follow other browsers if this setting causes too much breakage?

• Is browser.display.os-zoom-behavior=2 (text zoom, instead of full-zoom like everywhere else) a better default on Android for the text scaling setting? Or do we need to do something weirder? It seems Chrome tries to scale only some text, not clear how that works.

• If there's no clear winner, should we keep the current cross-platform default, switch, or offer text-zoom in the settings too?

Comment 6

[Krzysztof Drewniak]

There is a rather substantial workaround, namely switching to desktop view and zooming in manually.

I'd argue against ignoring the system-wide text scale, since "make the words bigger" is an unintrusive accessibility option for moderate vision issues, and people likely expect a text scaling setting to affect their browser.

(As a bit of uninformed speculation, could this be the result of text not being reflowed after the font size gets adjusted by the zoom setting? I noticed that the page I reported this bug in got a lot more hyphenated in Chrome)

Comment 7

[Calin Tanase]

Attachment: steam account.png

It can be observed on steam as well when accessing the profile on a newly created account.