Scalable Font Size

[LarryMcJ]

I'm sure this has been talked about before...but with the hundreds of messages in these, and other, Android forums about the inability to increase font size I wanted to post it. There are many visually impaired users who would like to see a fix for this...and many who aren't visually impaired who simply don't have 20-yr-old eyes anymore.

If the font size is perfectly scalable in the HTC email client...why can't the font size be increased in the Android Gmail app? This is what most of us don't understand. Many of us are not buying the phone simply because of the font size issue but we would if we knew that something (maybe similar to Spare Parts) that would work on the Gmail and SMS and other small and non-scalable font sizes.

I guess I'd just like to know if this will be fixed or an add-on developed in the next few months. If not, I'll go on (reluctantly) with my BlackBerry life.

Thanks for your thoughts.

 

[ktb1381]

I know I would be willing to pay for something like this.

 

[beadlam]

Absolutely!

 

[Kevin Vegas]

Better yet , I envision a "Reading Glass Mode" button. You set up your fonts one way for when you have your reading glasses with you but with one press of the button it switches to the font sizes you need to use if you don't have your reading glasses!

 

[ktb1381]

Sounds good to me, Kevin!

Anyone know if jumping the fonts up is really difficult? Is it very hard, or is it just that there's not much interest?

 

[doogster]

This is just crazy!!! My wife has a G1 and I have a MyTouch... neither one of us is "old"... we can still both see just fine... but we cannot read a lot of the stuff displayed on our phones... and currently there is no way to help us! UNACCEPTABLE!

 

[Kragar]

This is a major accessibility issue and they are not in compliance with the ADA. If those of us with vision issues in the US start bringing this up enough they may change. All it will take is one good class action suit to get their attention.

All we need is a simple scaleable text.

http://www.ada.gov

 

[FoFa]

If they just made the zoom feature available at the OS level, instead of by APP, that would work also.
Scalable FONTS or ZOOM available for whatever is on the screen, I mean, come on, Windows 3 had it, OS/2 had it, and most likely Apple's had it for many, many years.

Why is this such a new idea all of a sudden?

 

[ktb1381]

The iphone and Windows Mobile both seem to have awfully small text sizes with little or no means to increase them.

 

[ktb1381]

Friends,

There are websites like elance.com that allow you to commission development. You submit a project and a proposed cost and expert programmers bid on it.

Could this be a means that a group of motivated non-20-year-old Android fans could use to get a fix for this issue? Would you be willing to throw in a few bucks to the cause?

Note: I don't work for elance, and I'm not an Android developer, nor do I know any.

 

[paulz1]

i don't yet have trouble with all of the text, but definitely some, like the facebook app.

based on the source code (defaults) for display settings use the function called
updateFontScale() This function appears to be used to set/reset font scale size to a setting of 0, 1, or 2 in a number of display-related methods.

http://www.google.com/codesearch/p?...ge:git://android.git.kernel.org lang:java&d=4

I'm not sure where the default settings are physically stored, or if they are hard coded somewhere, but it appears that the Java command to retrieve app settings is something like
ActivityManagerNative.getDefault().getConfiguration()); Also, looking at the actual source for ActivityManagerNative, I drilled into
Resources.Configuration

it looks like Android definitely supports some global defaults for font scaling, but I'm not too sure where they are initially loaded from. That's the key piece here. If they are loaded from a settings file, it'd be more than easy to globally override this default (some quirks may happen if apps don't handle this well). If it's hard coded in the source, the fix is not so simple.

i love the OS, and I may even take a crack at this issue, but in the short term, thank it doesn't look too promising as far as a quick fix.

 

[paulz1]

OK, this looks to be stored in the system's SQLite database, so I "think" that an app may be able to run and update it.

 

[BratscheLebt]

I recommend going to Issue 4547 - android - DROID NO FONT SIZE ADJUSTMENT - Project Hosting on Google Code -- sign in, "star" the issue, and leave a comment. It might not help, but I can't think of a better approach.

 

[cfmed]

This could be a deal breaker for me

 

[lpnalda]

The iphone and Windows Mobile both seem to have awfully small text sizes with little or no means to increase them.

On the iPhone you can turn on zoom in settings>general>accessibility>zoom>turn on zoom. You can then invoke it with a 3 finger tap, then 3 fingers to move around the screen then 3 finger up or down to change magnification. This has been part of iOS since 3.0 and the the 3GS. I wished android would provide this or at least adjustable text size in the os.

 

[GTbrewer]

My vision was royally fscked up by chemotherapy and brain surgeries (specifically, one of the three). I've seen
e--book readers where the font size is, and I'm not joking here, about 2pt. For those not familiar with pts,
there are 76.(something) pts/inch, or something like that. This is ABSURD. I chose my e-book reader and
format so I could get a decent size font WITHOUT having to scroll side-to-side for every line, as well as
scrolling down for new pages (specifically, coolReader and ePub format). I agree that we need larger fonts,
but re-formatting text needs to go with that. There's a standard tool in Unix systems, including Linux, upon
which the Android OS is based, called fmt that will do this. The OS developers just need to implement it!