900428 - Button labels in the panel menu are too small

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Firefox :: Toolbars and Customization, defect)

Description

[Dão Gottwald [:dao]]

The button labels in the panel menu are ridiculously small, certainly small enough that users with poor eye sight won't be able to read them. We should either:

- Stop reducing the text size. This might cause labels to be cut off earlier, but they're only an additional hint anyway.

- Remove the labels. They aren't there for buttons placed on the toolbar. (There was an option for that, but we removed it.) If icons aren't distinctive enough, we should fix them. Tooltips are still there as additional hints.

Comment 1

[:Gijs (out for now; he/him)]

Tooltips aren't keyboard accessible for non-mouse users, though.

Comment 2

[Dão Gottwald [:dao]]

Well, I said "additional hint", because the primary hint should really be the icon.

Plus, we have a menu bar for proper keyboard access. If you're serious about making the panel menu a first-class keyboard access target (making it work for sub views, items that spawn menus and other randomly-structured widgets sounds like it should be a fun project...), I guess this leaves us with the option to use the standard size for UI text.

Comment 3

[u428464]

Note that the bookmarks widget label is already bigger than the others.

Comment 4

[:Gijs (out for now; he/him)]

I'd like to know what, if anything, we should be doing here. Note that the panel labels are extra-small on Linux currently (compared to Windows/OS X). I'm not sure if there's anything else that should be done.

Comment 5

[Stephen Horlander [:shorlander]]

(In reply to :Gijs Kruitbosch from comment #4)
> I'd like to know what, if anything, we should be doing here. Note that the
> panel labels are extra-small on Linux currently (compared to Windows/OS X).
> I'm not sure if there's anything else that should be done.

The labels are small, but not too small, on OS X and Windows. This seems Linux specific. Although the labels in the footer are much larger. Can we just match that size for the rest of the items?

Comment 6

[Dão Gottwald [:dao]]

(In reply to Stephen Horlander [:shorlander] from comment #5)
> (In reply to :Gijs Kruitbosch from comment #4)
> > I'd like to know what, if anything, we should be doing here. Note that the
> > panel labels are extra-small on Linux currently (compared to Windows/OS X).
> > I'm not sure if there's anything else that should be done.
> 
> The labels are small, but not too small, on OS X and Windows.

Based on what rule, data, etc.? I can't speak for OS X, but on Windows the font size is smaller than for any other UI text I can find. It also seems obvious to me that this will affect people with suboptimal eyesight who need to run Windows at 125% in order to make _normal_ text (which we're undercutting here) legible. Am I missing something?

Comment 7

[Stephen Horlander [:shorlander]]

(In reply to Dão Gottwald [:dao] from comment #6)
> (In reply to Stephen Horlander [:shorlander] from comment #5)
> > (In reply to :Gijs Kruitbosch from comment #4)
> > > I'd like to know what, if anything, we should be doing here. Note that the
> > > panel labels are extra-small on Linux currently (compared to Windows/OS X).
> > > I'm not sure if there's anything else that should be done.
> > 
> > The labels are small, but not too small, on OS X and Windows.
> 
> Based on what rule, data, etc.? I can't speak for OS X, but on Windows the
> font size is smaller than for any other UI text I can find. It also seems
> obvious to me that this will affect people with suboptimal eyesight who need
> to run Windows at 125% in order to make _normal_ text (which we're
> undercutting here) legible. Am I missing something?

You are right. I didn't look closely enough on Windows. On OS X the difference is not so stark. Likely due to font rendering differences. I will dig a little deeper and figure out a recommendation.

Comment 9

[:Gijs (out for now; he/him)]

Just to note: the font size in the panel menu is currently fixed at 10px throughout OSes. The perceived difference is solely because of context and/or the actual font family and/or display used being more or less legible at that size.

Ubuntu uses "Ubuntu" font and it's pretty much completely illegible - especially when compared to the default menu and url bar font size of 14.6px (on my VM, at least).

Mac uses "Lucida Grande", which is readable for me (on my retina screen), although less so since bug 941095 is still waiting to be backed out / fixed / whatever it is. The urlbar uses 12px. Tabs use bold 11px.

Windows uses "Segoe UI", which isn't very readable for me, but better than Ubuntu. The urlbar, the menubar and the tabs all use 12px.

Stephen, can we "just" use the 'regular' text size here instead, or did you want to propose something else?

Comment 10

[Dão Gottwald [:dao]]

(In reply to :Gijs Kruitbosch from comment #9)
> Just to note: the font size in the panel menu is currently fixed at 10px
> throughout OSes. The perceived difference is solely because of context
> and/or the actual font family and/or display used being more or less legible
> at that size.
> 
> Ubuntu uses "Ubuntu" font and it's pretty much completely illegible -
> especially when compared to the default menu and url bar font size of 14.6px
> (on my VM, at least).
> 
> Mac uses "Lucida Grande", which is readable for me (on my retina screen),
> although less so since bug 941095 is still waiting to be backed out / fixed
> / whatever it is. The urlbar uses 12px. Tabs use bold 11px.
> 
> Windows uses "Segoe UI", which isn't very readable for me, but better than
> Ubuntu. The urlbar, the menubar and the tabs all use 12px.
> 
> Stephen, can we "just" use the 'regular' text size here instead, or did you
> want to propose something else?

That's bug 900428.

Comment 11

[:Gijs (out for now; he/him)]

So, the plan from talking to Stephen is to use em and make it come out at about 11px on Windows/Mac, and see what that ends up meaning on Linux. I'll take this.

Comment 12

[:Gijs (out for now; he/him)]

Stephen is looking at the impact of switching to 11px on Mac, which causes more labels to wrap.

Comment 13

[:Gijs (out for now; he/him)]

I have a patch for this from Stephen that I need to tweak.

Comment 14

[:Gijs (out for now; he/him)]

Attachment: Increase Menu Panel Label Font-Size,

This is essentially the patch Stephen gave me, with some tweaks to use defines so it's obvious what certain values (7em for individual items) relate to.

Comment 15

[Jared Wein [:jaws] (please needinfo? me)]

Comment on attachment 8362940 [details] [diff] [review]
Increase Menu Panel Label Font-Size,

Review of attachment 8362940 [details] [diff] [review]:
-----------------------------------------------------------------

r+ but it would be cool if we can use `rem` for the font-size here.

Comment 16

[:Gijs (out for now; he/him)]

Landed with rem,

remote:   https://hg.mozilla.org/integration/fx-team/rev/f59607697038

Comment 17

[Ryan VanderMeulen [:RyanVM]]

https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/rev/f59607697038