"Large Text" accessibility option cannot be turned off. Text is too large

[Andi McClure]

SUMMARY

There is a little "accessibility" menu in the top right of my screen. If I click it, there is a switch saying "Large Text". It is enabled. If I click it to turn it off, it switches off, but nothing changes. If I then log out and back in, then click the accessibility menu, I find "Large Text" has been switched back on.

If in the "accessibility" menu I click "Accessibility Settings", it brings up a pane in the Settings app ("org.gnome.Settings.desktop"?). If I then click "Seeing", I see several settings, one of which is "Large Text". If I turn off "Large Text" here, it switches off, but nothing changes. If I then close Settings and choose "Accessibility Settings" then "Seeing" again, I find "Large Text" has been switched back on.

Additionally, all the text on my screen is too large. It is making it hard to use the computer.

NOTE: I would appreciate a rapid response in terms of "what information do you need me to gather to ensure the bug can be diagnosed properly". I have not fully debugged yet (I have not messed with gsettings, etc) because I don't want to destroy the bug state before gathering the appropriate diagnostics.

CONTEXT / DETAILED EXPLANATION

I have a hunch the Ubuntu installer is partially to blame, so I'm going to describe the events leading up to the problem.

Yesterday I got a new ThinkPad. This ThinkPad is "1.5x retina". That means it is 1080p (1920x1200 to be exact) in a laptop form factor and in order for things to look "normal size" it must display at 150%. The copy of Windows on the laptop was configured for 150% display scale for example. I took the ThinkPad out of the box and immediately wiped the Windows partition and installed 22.04 LTS from a USB stick. This worked but I had difficulty because the installer was running at 1x and so all the text was very small. My eyesight is not very good and I can read regular computer text but anything smaller than regular I have trouble. Once I got into the OS though I could set the display scale to 150% using Displays->Fractional Scale + Scale. Then everything looked good. I was happy. I did notice the Login screen had very small text though.

My 22.04 LTS worked well but a friend told me it's better to use regular updates rather than LTS, so I wiped my 22.04 LTS partition and installed 23.10.1 from a USB stick. This time I noticed something in the installer. The installer had an accessibility menu (little T pose man icon) and one of the options was "Large Text". Perfect! I clicked "Large Text" and my complaint about the text being too small to read in the installer was fixed. I installed 23.10 and booted. When I got to the login screen on first boot I noticed the accessibility menu again so I selected "Large Text" so the text on the login screen would not be so small. Then I logged in. I immediately set my display scale to 150% as before.

Inside 23.10, I quickly noticed that all the text was larger than I expected. Web pages that fit on my screen before did not anymore. A specific thing I noticed was the Mouse & Keyboard screen, the titlebar tabs were crowded where they had not been in 22.04 (see screenshot). It was then I noticed the anamolous, forced-on "Large Text" in the accessibility menu.

Remembering that I had set "Large Text" in the login screen, I tried logging out, turning off login screen "Large Text" and logging back in. The login screen "Large Text" is remembered correctly and on re-entering login large text remains off. But it did not help with "Large Text" being stuck on in the logged-in Wayland session.

I think 150% and "Large Text" are stacking and the two are combining to make everything too big. My hunch is that either enabling "Large Text" in the installer, or enabling "Large Text" in the login screen on first login, set "Large Text" in a strange way which is making it stuck on.

EXPECTED BEHAVIOR

It is unexpected to me that setting "Large Text" in either the installer, or the login screen, has an effect on the logged-in session. If setting scale/accessibility options in a logged-in session does not flow backward into the login screen, then I would not expect accessibility options in the login screen to flow forward into the logged-in session. In any case, a setting which cannot be turned off and turns itself back on is obviously unacceptable.

RELATED PROBLEM

If I click the accessibility menu and choose "Accessibility Settings" at the top there is an "Accessibility Menu" option (I have a screenshot but it is only letting me attach one thing). It says "Display menu for settings in top bar". This option is turned off. But the accessibility menu is visible. Turning this checkbox on, or off, has no effect. I do not know if this is the same problem or a different problem. My expected behavior is if a checkbox does nothing it should be removed.
---
ProblemType: Bug
ApportVersion: 2.27.0-0ubuntu5
Architecture: amd64
CasperMD5CheckResult: unknown
CloudArchitecture: x86_64
CloudID: none
CloudName: none
CloudPlatform: none
CloudSubPlatform: config
CurrentDesktop: ubuntu:GNOME
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 23.10
InstallationDate: Installed on 2023-10-18 (1 days ago)
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 23.10.1 "Mantic Minotaur" - Release amd64 (20231016.1)
Package: gnome-settings-daemon 45.0-1ubuntu1
PackageArchitecture: amd64
ProcEnviron:
 LANG=en_US.UTF-8
 PATH=(custom, no user)
 SHELL=/bin/bash
 TERM=xterm-256color
 XDG_RUNTIME_DIR=<set>
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 6.5.0-9.9-generic 6.5.3
Tags: mantic wayland-session
Uname: Linux 6.5.0-9-generic x86_64
UpgradeStatus: No upgrade log present (probably fresh install)
UserGroups: adm cdrom dip lpadmin plugdev sudo users
_MarkForUpload: True

[Andi McClure (andi-mcc)]

Here is the screenshot of the accessibility menu switch that does nothing.

[Andi McClure (andi-mcc)]

Here is the output of `gsettings list-recursively > gsettings.txt`.

[Tom Reynolds (tomreyn)]

Assigning to 'affects' against GSD, for lack of better understanding.

[Andi McClure (andi-mcc)]

apport information

[Andi McClure (andi-mcc)]

apport information

[Andi McClure (andi-mcc)]

A nice person on Mastodon (https://mstdn.mx/@federicomena/111258343031508914) gave me some things to try and I now believe I have an etiology of the bug and a repro

# Check if large text is on
gsettings get org.gnome.desktop.interface text-scaling-factor
gsettings reset org.gnome.desktop.interface text-scaling-factor
gsettings get org.gnome.desktop.interface text-scaling-factor

# Both gets printed 1.25. There was no effect.

# Force large text off
gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.interface text-scaling-factor 1.0
gsettings get org.gnome.desktop.interface text-scaling-factor # fingers crossed

Upon entering text-scaling-factor 1.0, the accessibility menu disappeared from my top bar, all the text returned to regular size, and upon entering Settings->Accessibility I saw that "Large Text" was off. So I now can get out of the bug state-- just run `gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.interface text-scaling-factor 1.0`.

However!!!

Now I have a repro: If after this I turn "Large Text" off in the Settings->Accessibility pane, *I re-enter the bug state* and I cannot turn Large Text off again.

Federico says he can't reproduce this in openSUSE Tumbleweed/GNOME 45, so this seems to be added by Ubuntu.

In conclusion I think there are *three* bugs here:

1. It is possible to enter Large Text Accessibility state without meaning to, either by selecting Large Text on the login screen, or (I think this is it) selecting Large Text in the installer. This is "surprising" behavior and should be either removed or signposted better.

2. When large text or another accessibility option is on, the accessibility menu cannot be turned off. However, this is not clearly indicated in the Settings->Accessibility pane. The "accessibility menu" setting effectively has three states: On, off, and "force-on". In "force-on" state, the "accessibility menu" switch has no effect. My "expected behavior" is that this "force-on" state should be unambiguously represented in the interface, for example, by drawing the switch both turned-on and grayed-out.

3. *If large text is turned on, by any mechanism, it is not possible to turn it off again except by using the command line*

I think (3) is a very serious bug, and it is probably a 23.10 regression because someone probably would have noticed it if it had been around for a while...?

[Erich Eickmeyer (eeickmeyer)]

As this bug may be an issue for those who may or may not have visual impairments, I'm going to go ahead and see if we can escalate this to the appropriate teams as accessibility is a high UX issue. The people on those teams might have an idea if this is an upstream issue and if it has been fixed yet or not, and if we can get this patched.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

[Rich McAllister (rfm)]

I can reproduce this with Ubuntu 23.10.1. It is necessary to select large text while running the installer (I did use the new installer.) The key difference is on a host installed without selecting large text in the installer, "gsettings reset org.gnome.desktop.interface text-scaling-factor" will reset the factor to 1.0. On a host installed *with* selecting large text in the installer, it will reset the factor to 1.25. Presumably the installer is somehow setting the default value in the installed image, but I don't know how to check that. Also presumably, the Accessibility menu implements "turn on large text" to mean "set text-scaling-factor 1.25" and "turn off large text" to mean "reset text-scaling-factor". So once the default value is set to 1.25, turning off is effectively a no-op. I do not know whether the bug here is in the installer -- that it shouldn't push the install value into the defaults of the image -- or in the accessibility dialog, which maybe should implement "turn off large text" as "set text-scaling-factor 1.0".