A few weeks ago I wrote a blog post about inclusive design and the role it plays within Agworld’s principles of design. One of the main facets of inclusive design that our users provide us feedback on, tends to be the ability to increase text size or the lack thereof. Due to the size of devices that get used, compare an iPhone 5 to an iPhone 11 for example, and the amount of information each screen can contain, text size is very important to keep our design as inclusive as possible. It is for this reason that we decided to improve the Agworld app’s text sizing ability in our latest release, version 6.16 for iPad and 5.6 for iPhone.

In iOS there’s an accessibility setting that enables you to change text size to suit you. This means you can make everything bigger, or smaller, to improve your ability to consume information. For third party apps, like Agworld, however this feature has to be implemented separately in order for the accessibility settings to work; this work has now begun in the latest versions of the Agworld app. The main area where you’ll benefit the most from this accessibility feature is with jobs, with the remaining areas of the app to follow.

Supporting larger text sizes means the layout of text should provide the same reading experience as the default text size. We don’t just want to cut off words when the text gets too large, as this doesn’t make your data readable, or useful, in order for you to get things done. Though it may seem there’s a lot less information on screen at one time; you’re still able to scroll and read everything.

A benefit to this approach is that we are now able to fit in all your inputs and fields. Previously we’ve had to truncate after a fixed number in order to fit on screen. By being a good citizen on iOS and respecting your text size setting, we’ve been able to uncover benefits such as this.

I hope this will improve the readability of jobs for you. As we look to implement more support for this, it’d be great to know if you currently do use the text size setting and where it’d most benefit you in Agworld? You can contact me at josh.lay@agworld.com.