To Firefox or Not to Firefox

I’m presented with somewhat of a dilemma.  I use Firefox because it renders Arial Rounded MT thicker than Safari or Chrome and spaces scaled up fonts on the page much better than Internet Explorer, thus making my personal visual internet experience much easier.  And then there’s the controversy over the Mozilla CEO.  

The recent storm swirling around Mozilla comes after the revelation that CEO Brendan Eich contributed large sums of money to support California’s 2011 Prop 8 to ban gay marriage.  Many in the tech community, including Hampton Catlin, a former developer for an app for the Firefox phone and current CTO of Moonweb and CEO of Rarebit, who is gay, and the gay friendly dating site OkCupid, have called for users to boycott Firefox.

I’m wrestling with the obvious advantages for my eyesight that Firefox currently offers versus a political point of view I find abhorrent.  But, then I ask myself what economic impact would some blind dude in Seattle not using a browser actually make on a company the size of Mozilla?  I mean, I don’t have a clue what the political proclivities of the CEO for Pete’s Coffee are and yet I’m sitting here enjoying my second cup today.  But I do make conscious decisions not to eat at Chic-Fil-A for instance.

I’d love to hear thoughts from the readers.  Let me know what you would do.

Hey Facebook. Let me scale my fonts.

CNN Money reported today that three of the top executives at Facebook received handsome compensation in 2013, and while that compensation was $10 million or so less than in 2012, it was still $15 or $16 million more the average Joe.  So, not Miggy money, but still Big Papi money, and definitely not the guy who’s bringing you the beer in the stands money.

Articles about Facebook execs always make me think about how incredibly young they are and all the pitfalls that inevitably brings.  Steve Jobs and Woz were smart enough to bring in some adult supervision when they took Apple out of the garage.  Larry Page and Sergey Brin knew a good thing in an experienced adult like Eric Schmidt.  But, where are the older folks at Facebook? 

And, more importantly, who at Facebook wears glasses?  They all obviously think every one of their users, at least their mobile app users, is 22, straight out of college, and has 20/15 vision.

As a low vision tech consumer, I’ve had to completely abandon the Facebook app for iPad because I can’t read anything past the headlines.  The fonts are too small and there’s nothing the user can do about it.   

There is an accessibility setting on the iPad that will allow the user to set the size of Dynamic Text, but it seems the only apps to use Dynamic Text are the native email app and the native texting / message app.

So, in this, the first real post of Technology Accessibility, I’m calling for Facebook and, hell, all mobile app developers, to build in options for low vision users to scale fonts.  That’s it.  Let me scale fonts and you’re my new best friend.  Mobile is the future and I want to be part of it.