608596 - Accessibility: Offer increased icon sizes

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Thunderbird :: Toolbars and Tabs, defect)

Description

[James R]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US) AppleWebKit/534.10 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/7.0.542.0 Safari/534.10
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9.2.9) Gecko/20100921 Fedora/3.1.4-1.fc13 Thunderbird/3.1.4 and http://download.mozilla.org/?product=thunderbird-3.1.4&os=win&lang=en-GB

There appears to be no feature to increase icon sizes within Thunderbird. This would be valuable to improve accessibility for those with poor sight.

For example, one sight-impaired user has his fonts set to large in the Windows 7 Accessibility control panel, however the icons in Thunderbird have remained their default sizes and do not offer very useful visual cues.

One example is email attachments. Despite the large interface font, the icon remains tiny (16x16px on Fedora).
 - It was not recognised by the user as an attachment
 - It is difficult to gain any visual clue indicating file type from the icon.
 - Small icon has a relatively small "target area" which can be clicked

Increased icon size would provide valuable useful cues, and make the interface easier to operate. 

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Adjust system accessibility settings to increase font size
Actual Results:  
Icons do not scale

Expected Results:  
Either:
 - Icons scale to improve visibility according to accessibility/font settings
 - Option may be enabled in order to display larger icons (32x32+ would be nice).

Attachments was where I originally noticed this, as the icons are very small. The toolbar size is OK, but it would be nice if it also scaled.

For attachments at least, I don't think any additional icons would need to be included with Thunderbird as it appears to use system stock icons.

Comment 1

[David E. Ross]

With the same version of Thunderbird and its Default theme, this is NOT a problem when running Windows XP.  Thus, there is a work-around:  Run Thunderbird in Windows XP compatibility mode.  This is NOT a solution, only a stopgap measure.  A Windows 7 installation that otherwise functions appropriately should not have to be run in the mode of an obsolete operating system in order to get all features.

Comment 3

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

Does density begin to handle this?
Or is this something on which we should prefer the OS to provide?

Comment 4

[Alessandro Castellani [:aleca]]

Yes, the touch density option increases the icon size.
I don't think we will implement an independent sizing feature just for icons.