Large font is a basic accessibility requirement for people who struggle to read small text on mobile screens. Think seniors or people with glasses who may need some assistance.
1 out of 5 iPhone users have large font enabled. Android would have a similar metric. How do many of the finance apps fare in this regard?
This blog post is a review of some common investment/finance apps available in Australia.
The Ratings
| App | Rating out of 5 | Notes | Worst Screenshot |
|---|---|---|---|
| CFS | 3 | The bar graphs and log in flow are the let down here |  |
| SunSuper | 2 | Dashboard is almost unusable |  |
| Aware super | 3 | Usable, bar graphs look pretty good but some icon overlap |  |
| Grow super | 2 | Hard to use |  |
| Rest super | 0 | No support at all for font increases |  |
| Aus super | 2 | Not a thorough test as account is in pending |  |
| Host plus | 0 | No support |  |
| Spaceship | 0 | No support |  |
| ANZ | 2 | Lots of overlap of elements |  |
| Commbank | 4 | Commbank is the best app for supporting this. Still not perfect but their bar graphs are better than CFS’s |  |
| Commsec | -5 | CommSec is completely useless with large fonts. Everything overlaps |  |
| Google Photos | 2 | Found a bug where I couldn’t share the album with large font |  |
| 86 400 | 3 | Surprisingly functional for a neobank |  |
| Up Bank | 0 | No support |  |
Ratings explained
0 out of 5, no support for font increases at all, basically rendering the app unusable for anyone who needs larger font
1 out of 5 a major bug was found and the app was blocked/unusable
e.g. our bug with large text on the scheduled outage message would have been a candidate for this. The view wasn’t scrollable and the dismiss button was off the screen (I’ve fixed it last sprint) and the user wouldn’t be able to access the app.
2 out of 5 some elements were inaccessible or unreadable. Functionality of the app was reduced.
3 out of 5, everything is functional but some graphs/views looked odd
4 out of 5, app is functional and is almost perfect
5 out of 5 everything was perfect, no issues were observed
Even Google struggles
It’s ok if your app has some bugs around large font. Even google who is a champion of accessibility and inclusive design struggles to accomodate this feature. Google photos is mostly usable but when I tried to share an album with large font I just couldn’t access the link.
Do you have large font on your phone? What’s been your favourite app that supports this feature?