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vpn  5mo ago (text post)   487 thread views

Feature request / bug (?) report: increase font size on mobile / do not ignore text scaling under accessibility settings

Maybe I'm getting old, but I have a hard time reading the tiny font size for posts on my Android phone. I could be in the minority, but if others struggle with this as well, maybe we could increase the default font size a tad on mobile. I'd suggest including a toggle option for all, but that sounds like an expensive feature request.

Separately, I've tried to deal with my aging by using the browser's text scaling feature (setting -> accessibility). However, this site appears to ignore this setting in both Chrome and Brave. While other sites mostly accommodate (it seems to depend on the type of text; some classes adopt text scaling while others ignore it), the Motte appears to completely ignore text scaling requests, at least on Android. This feels like a bug...?

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While we are at it, can we also have a 'are you sure you want to leave' pop-up if we have an incomplete comment ? I have lost one too many drafts to a suspended tab or accidental closure.

FWIW, the scaling works fine for me, in Firefox on Android, and Firefox on Linux, and Chromium on Linux. But not, however, in Chrome on Android.

You can go to your custom CSS settings and add

@media (max-width:480px) {
    p {
        font-size: 16px;
    }
}

which will bump the font size from 14px to 16px on mobile devices (technically "narrow screens" not "mobile devices" but that's just how it is in web dev) only (cc @George_E_Hale).

Chrome Android user here. Maybe ai didn't do it right but nothing changed for me.

Just tested, and this works great! Thanks faul_sname and george_e_hale!

Although, just speaking for myself, I'd argue the default is too small for the average logged out reader (or someone who doesn't want to bother with custom css). I still suspect this is some kind of weird bug, because while the font sizes look standard and comparable across this site, Reddit, and Scott's blog on desktop, on mobile (at least on Android), the font for this site looks particularly tiny compared to the others.

I also have this problem but use old man reading classes on the train. I have wondered, though, why the phone text-size settings didn't work with this site.

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