A partial archive of discourse.wicg.io as of Saturday February 24, 2024.

[Draft Idea/Spec/Proposal/Api] Idea for better accessibility in reading the web

raphaellouis
2022-05-11

Hi all! How are you guys?

Problem

  1. I would like web pages to have automatic zoom… for example suppose I click on any element on this page… clicking would zoom in… this could make any page easier to read… I wouldn’t want to depending on a company or a group of people for this, I would just like most browsers to have this implementation
  2. This is possible in a mobile environment, but in a desktop environment this was never implemented or considered… usually we have to press ctrl+ and ctrl- to zoom the page
  3. I would like browsers to natively adopt the guidelines that implement this as per here from wicg.
  4. Relying on a company to individually implement this feature is a problem.
  5. Relying on some company or individual browser to implement this feature is a problem.
  6. The solution in my opinion would be if the community could implement a guideline to make this possible
  7. There is an open source library that implements page zooming here : zoom-js Note: zoom-js is an minimal JavaScript API which enables zooming in on elements or rectangles in a document.

user stories

  1. Some people who work in the academic field are elderly people… - people I like, admire, respect and have great regard for. I want to make the web accessible to the people I know and speak here
  2. So… these people who are my friends… usually wear glasses… So, as they use the desktop a lot, it’s common to spend hours reading a scientific article or accessing the various websites available and social networks today…
  3. But as I mentioned earlier… the zoom feature is something that on cell phones when accessing the page is possible, but on the desktop it is not, given that on the desktop because it has less usage than mobile…
  4. Many companies and browsers still haven’t thought about implementing zoom in the desktop environment
  5. For this reason I’m requesting a dynamic api that does this on the entire page I access… This would be inside the <body zoom="true"></body> tag

Source-code

<script src="https://lab.hakim.se/zoom-js/js/zoom.js"></script>
<script>
document.querySelector( '.page-body' ).addEventListener( 'click', function( event ) {
event.preventDefault();
zoom.to({ element: event.target });
} );
</script>

Notes

  1. I would be happy if there are any bad or good answers about this idea
  2. I would like to help the web positively, in a good way
  3. This would allow for better web accessibility for people with reading difficulties, I would like to help the web and the web community
  4. Now everything you click on will automatically zoom, which is really cool and interesting for those users I mentioned here, who are my friends
hamblingreg52
2022-05-13

I’m a big fan of the idea of creating a better reading experience on the web. I think it’s important that as designers, we take into account the needs of every visitor and make sure that our websites are accessible to as many people as possible.

raphaellouis
2022-05-14

thank you for feedback ;D

patrick_h_lauke
2022-07-30

This sounds like a feature that should be purely implemented on the user agent side (since, as you say, browsers on mobile/tablet already do it).

Just defining a JS API to allow “zoom” to an element still won’t do anything unless authors then add their own custom way of triggering zoom on their page (and simply tying it randomly to a “click” event listener on every single element in your page will have dire performance issues, and won’t be keyboard accessible, and will interfere with any other event handling on the page).

So, while the idea of having a zoom API is nice, I don’t think it’ll have the effect that you hope it will have.