I guess there’s not a font size setting here?
It shrunk a lot overnight for me here, though not on other sites. Fiddling with font size in my browser and in my phone doesn’t enlarge it. 
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haven’t noticed that here on my android phone using duckduck as my browser(?)
used to get that a lot over at TOP.
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That’s very strange. I definitely didn’t change anything on my side. Maybe try changing the theme to see if that has any effect?
Fonts should just be fonts, and the site really shouldn’t be able to do anything other than suggest a default font size (etc.), leaving it up to the browser to interpret it and display it. That you aren’t able to resize it in your browser is odd, for sure.
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There already was a food thread here.
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It shrank for me here, too—just a few minutes ago, when I noticed that I had a notification for an update of Chrome, and I let it update. It seemed like the whole page size here shrank, not just the text.
But I think you don’t use Chrome, IIRC? Is it possible that you use a browser that’s Chrome-based, that may have had a recent similar update?? (Do Chrome-based things keep up with Chrome, or are they on their own once they’ve been created? I don’t know a lot about these things…)
There is the “Text Size” setting here under Preferences>Interface, I think that’s what @LockeCJ is referring to…did you try that, I wonder?
But I left my “Text Size” here set on ”Normal” and instead got a size that I like just by zooming in with the browser and making the whole page bigger.
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Thanks, and @LockeCJ. I did enlarge it there, but it stays tiny. Huh.
I switch between Brave and Mozilla; the shtinkage happened on the former, not the latter. Maybe Brave is Chrome based? I’d stick with Mozilla (for other reasons too), but the comment function on there is janky.
Anyway, I’m getting more accustomed to the tininess.
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Weird. (I assume you did “Save Changes” and then refreshed whatever pages you had open, of course.)
Yes, Brave is Chromium-based, but Mozilla is not. And that’s pretty much all I know about it, lol.
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Me, too! I wonder if it was a Brave setting that changed when I updated the app?
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That worked for me! I looked around and I must have passed by the “Interface” tab. Thanks, @zfirphdn and @LockeCJ!!
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Also found the accessibility setting on Brave and was able to adjust.
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Hey everybody,
Look, I’mma be clear: when implementing our initial custom themes, I done fucked up by not considering the accessibility needs of members who ain’t me. Or the needs of future me, for that matter. My eyesight is not what it used to be, and digging into multiple nested menus three webpages deep has not been an acceptable experience for me. I’ve been working with and for the benefit of folks with varying levels of physical abilities at my day job these last few years and it has taught me a lot about how designing with accessibility in mind improves the experience for everyone.
I’ve booked a week off from my day job next month, and will be working to make Discourse the forum software more accessible for every visitor, not just to the cafè, but to any Discourse board implementing our toolset.
In the meantime, I’m going to see if Sienna’s toolkit can cover the gaps in our rather inaccessible experience, and if so, enable Sienna’s toolkit this weekend as a temporary stop-gap measure.
This is why working with a variety of people pf different physical abilities and an array of experiences fucking matters: everyone’s experience improves when things are built so everybody, not just one specific person with specific visual acuity, can participate. DEIA, motherfucking technerds: if you want to talk to your friends for the next fifty years of the web, you gotta build for it or you will inevitably talk to fewer and fewer people as folks abilities lessen and eyesights worsen.
Finally, if Jeff from Discourse reads this: lol. lmao. how did this not occur to you? no friends?!!!
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Not many woman friends, anyway
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Thank you.
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When the original dark theme was introduced several years back, I complained mightily about various contrast bugs that made things unacceptably difficult to read at best, impossible to read at worst.
I volunteered to spend some time tweaking the CSS to improve the contrast ratios some while preserving the overall look (IOW not a specific “high contrast” theme so much as making it more generally readable). I was rebuffed with a comment along the lines of oh it’s just for aesthetics and accessibility isn’t a concern.
The dark theme has improved over the years but that whole interaction was very disappointing. It also made me decide I didn’t want to spend any free time contributing to Discourse. I’ve definitely noticed a trend of any feedback taken with extreme hostility.
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That’s not at all uncommon with open source software. There’s definitely a big ego factor involved in open source.
One that I encountered today, not related to Discourse, but similar. There’s this module that automatically provides a JSON API that frontend code can call for data from the CMS backend. Some of the database queries it produces are pretty bad. The CMS has a system of query tags, so you can say $query->addTag('this_is_query_xyz'); and then that allows other code elsewhere to check if ($query->hasTag('this_is_query_xyz')) and alter the query to make it perform better with your data or whatever. There have been multiple requests for them to just add a tag to their queries, so that other people, when building a site, can then make use of that feature, but they refuse. Because “That one single line of code would have to be maintained and we don’t feel it’s necessary or worth the maintenance burden.” 
That’s just their ego. Nothing could ever be wrong with queries their code generates, so why would anyone ever want to alter them?
There’s another that annoys me. PHPCPD looks for copy-pasted duplicate code, and nags you to refactor it if you have duplicate code above a threshold. Pretty much every other code quality scanner tool has some kind of mechanism for adding an exception. So you can tell it “Yes, this method is really long, but that’s intentional, and it’s okay in this case because it’s test code.” and it’ll stop nagging you. Not CPD. The maintainer insists that no code should ever be duplicated and there should be no exceptions, even if you’re setting up two test cases that are very similar but have a few key differences, or dealing with standard boilerplate. There’ve been several requests for it, and he just closes all of them with a curt dismissal.
That’s just ego. If you don’t code everything exactly the way he wants, then why are you even coding?
I call those out because those are both cases of existing features widely-implemented in other code in the same systems, and trivial to add. But rather than add one line of code to help their users, the maintainers will write hundreds of lines of comments in the issue queue to declare that they refuse because they don’t want to and people who want it are wrong.
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I get the DRY principle, but that’s just dogmatic enforcement. That you can’t override it and say, “yes there’s a good reason for this and it’s not worth the effort to do it differently” is just silly. Not everything has to be treated like NASA-quality code.
Ain’t that the damn truth. I remember spending time on the Discourse forums to complain about something and just getting railed on by the PTB essentially being told “I’m holding it wrong”, “why wouldn’t you want it this way”, and otherwise completely dismissing my experiences. Discourse, I love you, but some of your developers have shitty attitudes.
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This happens everywhere and I used to call it the “academics vs reality” fight.
Before everyone settled on Ansible or saltstack (or terraform) for config management/IaC, there was a holy war between configs system that were prescriptive- (that is, you write how things should be, the tool makes reality match your definition, full stop), vs tools that can examine how the world is and then convert that into a definition.
Many of those tools that came from large university networks or early supercomputer teams were staunchly against examining the existing world at all - why would you ever let anyone deploy something outside the definition?
Of course outside of academia when something breaks you go fix it, and if that means kludging something together to get it working again and then coming back around to make your definition match reality afterwards, well, that’s what you do, because otherwise your infrastructure is down and people are pissed off at you. But if you’ve only run a fiefdom of a campus / research network and your users are more nuisances than customers or otherwise don’t get a say in reliability, well then, sure, spend an extra hour fixing your definition before you bring your infra back up.
Google even enshrined this in their cloud! “Preemptible” servers used to have a 24-hour restart timer (unlike competitors where preemptible workloads ran until that capacity was needed by a non-preemptible customer, often for weeks or months) - for no other reason than that Google thought that anyone running preemptible workloads “should build their systems to be tolerant of daily restarts as a good practice” - completely ignoring reality. There though, they have customers not serfs (unlike a lot of their other monopolistic business divisions) and were forced to change their offering.
So it’s not just the FLOSS community that is this way, it’s idealism vs pragmatism overall.
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Someone wiser than me once said to me, “shipping is a feature”. This gave me a lot of perspective.
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ego
Dear FSM I’ve run into this so much when trying to integrate open source libraries. I have a flat spot on my head from banging it into a wall so often.
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