Mobile/Readabilityv2

Readability 2.0

Mission: Meet or Exceed iOS Readability

Schedule

18-36 weeks (incremental progress across v16, v17, v18)

Readability Team

Eng Management: blassey, mfinkle, madhava, jet
elancaster: pgm
dbaron:layout
lucas:front-end
sjohnson:layout
jkew:layout
ian: UX
mwargers:QA
-? One more layout person-?

Team members request iOS iPod Touch devices here:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/enter_bug.cgi?product=mozilla.org&format=itrequest

Useful Links

http://www.vanseodesign.com/web-design/legible-readable-typography/
http://blog.mozilla.org/nattokirai/

Competitive Analysis

• Opera/Stock browser uses reflow on zoom
  
• Chrome does inflation & reflow
  
• Chrome doesn't do reflow on gesture. Kerning/linespacing isn't as nice
  
• iOS is generally seen as better than Android
  
  • iPhone preserves appearance more than boost readability
    
  • iOS hides their font inflation well (less intrusive)
    
  • iOS more reliably picks the "correct" web font (see wired.com for ex.)
    

(may just be fennec bugs there)

UX Themes & Open Questions

• Balance Legibility vs. Beauty
  
• Font Rendering at zoom levels
  
• Use smaller fonts on a page, if rendered more crisply
  
• Improved letterspacing/kerning
  
• What is the user really wanting to see/read? Need this info from the front end to the layout engine
  
• Open Question: Meet or exceed the iPhone in aggregate vs. individual features?
  
• Font hinting keyed to a particular size/zoom
  
• Basic Typography Features are better on iOS than Android
  

Implementation Options

• Open question: How much should we revisit font inflation decisions?
  
• Shipping our own fonts to replace:
  
  • verdana, georgia, times
    
  • droid sans, serf
    
  • Ship better readable fonts. ( Adobe Myriad 'sans', Minion 'serif' as Arial/Helv/Times)
    
  • We already have an app specific font directory
    
  • Latin vs. non-latin basically the same rules (re: inflation)
    
• Fennec Reader Mode (Lucas Rocha)
  
  • Open question: Where else other than the browser to have Readability features? e-mail client? other apps?
    
  • extract articles, headlines, typeset for readability
    
  • readability.com API
    
• Readability stylesheets for reading (1 or many?)
  
• Ultra-high Density Display Support
  
• Very Low Density Display Support (B2G @ 320 x 480)
  
• Text-size-adjust standardization?
  • Can we seek out people who left Apple for spec comments? They're likely still be bound by NDA.
• We have our own text engine, but not our own fonts. Can we leverage that?