Forum Zoom on Android

A request to those responsible for the forum to consider.

I find that I am increasingly using my android phone and tablet to view the forum, but the forum interface often completely negates the ability to zoom to view and read small text or details on mobile devices.

As the screen for this forum is zoomed in (spread) the top and bottom page bars (that are designed to stay static when scrolling) expand and cover the forum content that needs to be enlarged.

A good example of this issue is when trying to read the error message screenshot in the thread at [SOLVED] Why Can't I Install A Plugin on My Sketchup?

The problem exists both using mobile chrome and firefox. Those of us who need to use assists such as setting large font sized are additionally penalized by these design features which assume a “standard” screen layout and the 20/20 vision of twenty somethings :wink:

Thanks in advance for any consideration to this need.
Beverly Howard

Hi @bevhoward,

If the forum’s text is too small you can ajust it with either your Android’s accessibility features or your browser accesibility features (Firefox help, in Chrome you can open your settings then Advanced → Accessibility → Text Scaling).

If the text is readable but you are only referring to text within images (such as your exemple), you might want to touch the screenshot to open the screenshot in the forum’s image viewer (just like you would with your regular desktop browser) and then touch again to zoom it to 1:1 scale.

This works for me on Chrome and Firefox in Android.

Hope this helps! :smile:

Great suggestion, but, those are already at max settings and have been
for years. Even with these set to maximum, the message text on my
Nexus7 tablet is still unreadable unless I “spread” the screen… of
course that then requires that I horizontally scroll each line of
text.

My point is that while keeping the top/bottom banner bars static when
scrolling may have benefit on a computer or laptop screen, they
severely impact the available screen size on mobile devices. While
the forum is accessible on small screens, they (and other forum page
design) features reduce access to the content. It is technically
possible to read the user agent information and disable things that
hinder mobile access.

Attached is a screenshot of an exaggerated example of how these
banners intrude on the content. Notice that in addition to the
banners, icons are also stacked into the content area, further
restricting access to the information posted. In this example, the
banners and icons consume or interfere with 75% of the page.

In addition to your suggestions, there are other options… for
example, reading view, but all of these impose their own additional
restrictions such as removing images as reading view does. Expanding
images by tapping them works, but, for some reason, it often becomes
impossible to reach the “X” to close the image box necessitating
reloading the page.

The goal of community forums is to make accessing information and help
easier… my post was simply an observation that the sketchup forum
page design makes accomplishing that more difficult… plus, there is
the distinct possibility that those responsible for implementing these
features is not even aware of the problems they generate for mobile
access, not to mention problems for those with less than perfect
vision.

Thanks for the response… appreciated.

Beverly Howard

Hi @bevhoward

From your screenshot, I can see that this is not a normal behavior.

Using both Android and Chrome accessibility features to max out text scale on an Galaxy S3 phone (320DPI) running Android 5.1.1, the forum elements never seem to scale up to the point of hindering the view of the message:

Knowing that SketchUp’s forum is based on the Discourse engine, I’ve tried this on two other Discourse forum as well, all of them yielding acceptable results. Even force zooming does not produce a result similar to yours on my end so that’s unfortunately as far as I can troubleshoot with you for now.

With hope that a SketchUp Team Member chime in and help you resolve your problem!

Good luck :smile: