Preferred Text Scaling needs to be Reverted - Abrupt Release with No Concerns Addressed are Disruptive

[index_self]

In August last year, Roblox introduced a Studio Beta for a feature called ‘Preferred Text Scaling’, which added a new setting for players that controlled how rendered text scaled in UI, regardless of developer intent.

In the original announcement thread, many developers had voiced their concerns with their UIs breaking when this new setting was changed. None of these concerns were addressed, and after 4 months, the thread was closed.

This prompted people to believe the feature was cancelled, and so no further discussion was made. However, 8 months after the original thread was closed (12 months since it was announced), it was revealed that the feature had abruptly went live, with no changes or concerns addressed. The announcement thread isn’t even open for new replies anymore.

The Request

Multiple Roblox games now have broken UI when the client’s setting is set to anything above ‘Medium’. This at best makes the feature useless, and at worst ruins UI for people unaware of the setting defaults changing.

Instead of a universal setting that dramatically alters how our UIs scale, Roblox should’ve made a setting like this opt-in through a property that developers can toggle to preserve backwards-compatbility. As it is right now, it is near impossible to retroactively fix our affected UIs, and even if we could, we would’ve had zero warning to prepare for a change like this.

Because of this, I believe it would be in the majority’s best interest to revert this setting and bring the feature back to the drawing board. This feature is clearly in no shape of being released and is actively disruptive for players and developers alike.

This request also acts to highlight a secondary issue: feature transparency. This issue could’ve been avoided entirely if the team working on this feature had taken developer feedback into account. Furthermore, there should’ve been at least some proactive warning for a feature like this going live, so developers could at least have time to prepare for the changes. A last-minute notice after 12 months of silence is unacceptable.

[BitwiseAndrea (Bitwise)]

Thank you for the feedback! The Preferred Text Size setting is fundamentally an accessibility feature designed to help users who have difficulty reading smaller text in games. This is a user-controlled setting that allows players to adjust text scaling based on their individual needs.

While we understand that some developers are concerned about visual changes to their UIs, we’ve made the deliberate choice to prioritize user accessibility over maintaining the exact original appearance of interfaces. In most cases, UIs remain functionally intact - the primary concern tends to be aesthetic rather than complete breakage. We believe that users who need larger text for accessibility reasons should have the autonomy to make that choice, even if it means some visual distortion. Making accessibility features opt-in unfortunately often means they don’t get implemented, as accessibility tends to be lower on many developers’ priority lists. By making this a user-controlled setting rather than a developer-controlled one, we ensure that players who need these accommodations can access them across all experiences.

Since the beta release, we’ve been working hard behind the scenes to fix bugs and improve how our platform supports this setting! This has been an active area of development as we refine the feature’s implementation. We hear your feedback loud and clear regarding communication around this feature rollout - the concerns about transparency and advance notice are valid, and we will take this feedback into account for future feature releases of this scope. We recognize that better communication could have helped developers prepare and plan accordingly

[index_self]

Hey, thanks for responding!

I understand the goal of trying to give players more power over how they experience our games to better fit their own needs and accommodations. However, I am against achieving that goal in a way that entirely alienates developer intent.

Settings like Preferred Transparency/Reduce Motion don’t change anything without the developer setting it up themselves (besides the CoreGui and LuaApps, which is fine), so I fail to see why text scaling should be an exception.

If the majority of our games’ UIs visually break when this setting is changed, there is little to no incentive for anyone to ever mess with it. Even if a small pocket of games goes out of their way to make their UIs work perfectly with it, there’s a thousand and one other games that won’t.

A preferred text size setting should just indicate what the player prefers so a developer can accommodate for it themselves, and if the developer doesn’t, nothing breaks. If someone is actively using this feature right now, I bet you they’re toggling it on and off for every other game they join.

[Izuk_ii (Izuki)]

Preferred Text Scaling should not be forced upon developers.
The majority of my panel UI is messed up because in most cases UI doesn’t automatically scale with text. Sometimes its so bad the text is unreadable or important parts are covered up.

Using the enum provided by GuiService I could easily implement my own ui scaling, unfortunately there is no good way to disable text scaling for individual ui objects. (except using text size constraints but that method doesnt work in all cases, and feels quite hacky)

I request a property to disable text scaling of a ui object and it’s descendants. Like how AutoLocalize exists to disable automatic translation for individual ui objects.
It would make implementing user accessibility features so much easier.