zoom / enhance for page "main area"

[cyrile]

Hello,

I am not as young as I used to be, and my eyes are not getting any younger... As a result, reading things on my computer is getting harder. To add insult to injury, the current "trend" by designers is to have rather "thin" typeface and to use "gray on white" schemes...

While I can use the zoom feature (Ctrl+wheel), it tend to also zoom the stuff that I am not interested in a webpage (the side/navigation part), and therefore reduce the space used by the "central" part (where the interesting stuff normally is).

Could you create a "enhance main area" function which would zoom the center part of the webpage (I know that deciding what is "center" is not trivial) and bold out the typeface for good measure? That would be a trully great feature.

I understand that programatically finding/detecting what is "interesting" and what is "usless" on a page is hard and that the feature would not work 100%, but as long as it works on "standard implementation" webpages it would be great. For example on slashdot.org...

Thanks and keep on the great work.

Cyrille

[Jon]

Thanks for submitting an idea to the Mozilla Connect community! Your idea is now open to votes (aka kudos) and comments.

[Jon]

Hi @cyrile, 

Thanks for sharing this! Just to follow up so we can better understand, have you already exhausted the Accessibility features in Firefox or used any High Contrast Mode settings? More info on those here:

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/accessibility-features-firefox#w_page-zoom

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/change-fonts-and-colors-websites-use

Looking forward to working on this together.

[cyrile]

Hello,

Yes, I did look at it, and I use the zoom feature quite a bit (actually on Ctrl+wheel shortcut)...

But, it does not only zoom the text, it also zooms the "sizes" of the different part of the site.

Since a lot of sites seems to be based upon a "side vertical area of fixed size" with a "central area that takes the rest", zooming tends to make that side area, which in fact does not contain content, but navigation, information and the like, bigger, thus reducing the space for the actual content area.

As I was saying, https://slashdot.org is a very good example here...

Would they be a way to zoom the "content" area, not the "rest of the page"?

Also, is there a way to make the font bold? As I was saying earlier, the fashion seems to be moving toward thinner fonts, this makes them harder to read for people with medium eye issues.

I am aware and I have tried high contrast and accessibility features, but they seem to be designed for people with much much higher visual handicap than me (I have -4 in each eye and -3 in astigmatism, it beeing mostly corrected by my glasses).

Thanks for taking the time to read my comments,

I have been a Firefox user for more years than I care to count and have no intention to moving away!

Cyrille

[Jon]

This is great feedback, @cyrile. Thanks! Let me pass this along so it gets in front of the right team here at Mozilla.