https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=48946
--- Comment #7 from Gregory Swain <thex...@thexlab.com> --- Hi Jon: I'm no expert on accessibility either, but I did spend a lot of my career in software design and usability. This is something of a Catch 22 situation. Mobile Safari doesn't permit one to specify a default minimum font size (Safari on OS X does in the Advanced tab of Safari Preferences). The problem of small fonts on mobile-optimized Web sites would be solved if Apple added this feature to mobile Safari. Barring that, it's up to the designers of Web sites targeted at smartphones to either use larger default fonts or to offer a feature to change the font size of the content. This puts the Web designer in a bind between larger fonts (which people with perfect vision might not like) and the chore of coding a font-adjustment feature. If one were to use the old IBM "CUPRIMDS" defect classification system (CUPRIMDS = Capability, Usability, Performance, Reliability, Installability, Maintainability, Documentation, Service), this font issue is a Capability bug in Mobile Safari or the mobile Web site. Capability bugs are bugs in "Functionality delivered versus requirements." Identifying this issue as a Capability bug is why I decided to report this issue via Bugzilla. I initially sent an e-mail about the font size issue to the Wikipedia Information Team and was directed to The Village Pump, but after a fruitless attempt to figure out how to raise this issue there, my developer background kicked in and I decided this was a Capability bug that needed reporting via Bugzilla. To address your particulars, I can only speak from my personal experience and my perspective as an iPhone 5 user: >> * what the exact problem is that this would be solving that zooming doesn't >> help with I find the default font on mobile Wikipedia too small. I suspect I'm not the only person who feels this way (you'd need to survey to find out). For me, reading Wikipedia articles (and other "mobile-optimized" Web sites with small fonts) for a period of time frequently leads to symptoms of CVS. Zooming doesn't help because it complicates the experience of reading long-form articles. Try reading the Wikipedia article on World War I zoomed via three-finger tap on an iPhone: it's a nightmare of constant horizontal scrolling (in either portrait or landscape mode) to read sentences. Reading long-form articles when zoomed is an awful user experience. The navigation when zoomed via the three-finger tap isn't great. IMO, zoom is more useful for viewing images than reading long-form text. What I'm looking for is the kind of user experience one has in e-readers or when using the Reader mode of mobile Safari: one that allows for font size adjustment. Unfortunately, mobile Wikipedia articles are coded in a way that the Reader feature is unavailable. As an aside, I've been unable to find any Apple guidelines for Web designers to make their content work in Reader. If you search Google for "safari reader design guidelines" (sans quotes) you'll find some posts relating experiments Web developers have performed to glean Reader-friendly design guidelines, but there are no official guidelines from Apple on how to design Web pages so they work with the Reader function. >> * what the ways we might solve it (maybe they are not simply limited to tweaking the font size) The problem for me is the default font size! If the default font size of the mobile Wikipedia site was larger — like that on ReadWrite or The Next Web — I wouldn't have a problem reading them. I've spent a long time thinking about this problem, so perhaps I'm now too close to it, but as I see it, there are three ways the mobile Wikipedia site could address the problem: 1. Increase the default font size (perhaps only for iPhone users) along the lines of the sites I've cited earlier. This would be the easiest to implement. 2. Code a feature to adjust the font size to the user's liking (I'd recommend saving the preference in a cookie instead of requiring a log-in: as a user of Wikipedia, rather than a contributor / editor, I don't log in). 3. Design mobile Wikipedia pages so their full content can be read using the Reader function of Mobile Safari. Reader has a built-in font size adjustment feature. (I suspect the divisions in the mobile-optimized pages are prohibiting Reader). I've searched to see if anyone has published guidelines on optimal font size for mobile Web site design. I haven't found any, but perhaps Jakob Nielsen may have some in the Nielsen Norman Group report on mobile Website design guidelines (I'm not going to purchase the report to find out). More of the debate in this area seems to be focused on "Responsive Design" vs. "Dedicated Mobile Site" and doesn't get into basics like font size. Those in the debate may be blindsided by their proximity to the problem: Google may not see the issue because Android mobile browsers have the font size adjustment that mobile Safari lacks; Apple may see Zoom and Reader as the answers to all such problems, hence why mobile Safari lacks the minimum font size feature of the OS X version. >> * What is the extent of the problem? (Which browsers do not have a font size setting? is it just iphone users? What percentage of our iphone users are hit by this problem?) Tough to put a number on this. I'd say this is clearly a problem for all iPhone users who find the default font size too small. I'm sure the Wikimedia Foundation has stats on how many folks read mobile Wikipedia on an iPhone. You'd have to survey to find out how many folks have issues with the current default font size. I've given you stats above indicating roughly a third of the US population wears vision correction (glasses, contacts, etc.). Maybe a third of all iPhone users of Mobile Wikipedia have issues with the default font size? CVS is a problem for people regardless of whether or not they wear vision correction. Tiny fonts probably exacerbate CVS, as noted in one of the earlier articles I cited. It's difficult for people who are Wikipedia readers – vs contributors "in the community" — to bring issues like this forward. If people can't find an easy way to complain about a site, they either put up with the problem or stop using the site. -- You are receiving this mail because: You are the assignee for the bug. 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