Open Radar

 
07-Jan-2012 11:39 PM Grzegorz Adam Hankiewicz:
In the accessibility preferences of iOS 5.x there is an option to scale the text of applications like mail and messages. Not everything in the UI is scaled, depends on the application.

The request is to expose this setting as a global variable to individual apps so that they can read this value and resize their user interface and format text with bigger values like the system apps to help visibility impaired users to use other apps too.

That would be enough, but if you want to go the extra mile...

- Provide a mechanism similar to "retina display" pixel scaling where UILabel objects would have a scale property.

- Each individual UILabel could have a "usesSystemScaling" by default set to NO. Enabling this to YES in applications would scale the fonts to the value of the scale property (which by default would be set by the user through app preferences). The final size of the font would be size specified by app multiplied by the system scale if the usesSystemScaling is set to YES on that label. If no, multiply by 1.

- Rather than forcing final users to go to the apps settings to reset the scale of the font, you could implement a font scale slider similar to the ibooks application in the notification center (if enabled, like the wheater widget) so that 3rd party applications are not required to implement their own. For bonus points, implement the text scaling widget along with a brightness widget and get rid of the custom ones inside the ibooks app.

- Thanks to the scale meter being implemented in the notification center, the scaling could change while the app is running, so you would need to add a notification for the UI to refresh itself if the scale has changed, possibly requiring a new relayout of the views.

- While there are apps that could scale well with the system defaults value, it would be nice if apps could have an individual scale value/factor, which could well be the previously suggested UILabel.scale property if that is reserved for custom app usage and a +UILabel systemFontScale read only value is provided for the other.

So we would have: uilabel size * app scaling * system scaling if the uilabel object did set usesSystemScaling to YES, or simply uilabel size * app scaling if the uilabel object did set the usesSystemScaling to NO.

- In iOS 6.x set the usesSystemScaling by default to YES like with the airplay feature of videos, which originally was set to NO in the 3.x series.

Do I get a cookie? I hope visually impaired users do.