- From: Matthew Tylee Atkinson <notifications@github.com>
- Date: Wed, 17 Dec 2025 13:14:03 -0800
- To: w3ctag/design-reviews <design-reviews@noreply.github.com>
- Cc: Subscribed <subscribed@noreply.github.com>
- Message-ID: <w3ctag/design-reviews/issues/1172/3667190967@github.com>
matatk left a comment (w3ctag/design-reviews#1172) Hi @davidsgrogan, and thanks for your review request. Speaking personally, as someone with a vision impairment, this is something I have wanted to see on the web for some time; thank you for working on it! We have some feedback on the feature, the explainer, and concerns and suggestions about adoption. Regarding the feature: * Overall, this seems like a great improvement. * Have you considered keeping _only_ `legacy` and `scale` as values, and having the UA (on behalf of, and influenced by, the user, the device, and other factors) decide on what sort of scaling (linear or otherwise) to apply? This seems to be a decision on which the user would know best (possibly also guided by their UA and device). As you say in the explainer, the reason that `text-scale` has to be opt-in is potential breakage of _existing_ sites. However, new sites that are designed with a more adaptive approach to text sizing could be much more robust against whether the scale is linear or otherwise. Have you considered explicitly making this choice up to the UA? * Regarding the [question as to whether the font size keywords should also scale](https://github.com/w3c/csswg-drafts/issues/12475): we think this makes sense and should be included. * We'd agree in expecting it to be very likely there would be significant breakage of existing site layouts if scaling were the default. But out of curiosity: have you done any testing to check on this? Regarding the explainer: * It's a well-written document, but it would be really helpful to have more illustrative examples - at least one "before and after" style example - of the effect of the proposal. * Our read on the proposal is that it _would_ affect the base font size on desktop too (i.e. as well as mobile) - but [the table](https://github.com/w3c/csswg-drafts/blob/main/css-env-1/explainers/meta-text-scale.md#comparison-of-legacy-and-scale) makes this seem a little unclear - could you clarify? Concerns regarding adoption: From experience working with developers, the huge barrier this has to get over is that people need to opt in. It may be very hard to persuade busy development teams to opt in without some substantial resources to help them get started with such layouts. These may include: - Guidance for authors in the spec. - [WAI Tutorials](https://www.w3.org/WAI/tutorials/) for authors to make more adaptive/robust/accessible layouts. - Making PRs on established projects such as + React Starter + Svelte + anything to do with bootstrapping projects Getting this into the default `<head>` for projects will help achieve adoption - but it will also need some helpful resources for busy developers to ensure that the DX is still good. You might want to contact [Docs CG](https://www.w3.org/community/docs-cg/) to see if they can assist you with writing the developer documentation. We look forward to hearing your thoughts on this. Thanks to @AutoSponge in APA WG for the benefit of his experience managing development. -- Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub: https://github.com/w3ctag/design-reviews/issues/1172#issuecomment-3667190967 You are receiving this because you are subscribed to this thread. Message ID: <w3ctag/design-reviews/issues/1172/3667190967@github.com>
Received on Wednesday, 17 December 2025 21:14:07 UTC