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Comment by jordanlev | Hacker News Reader

Standard accessibility disclaimer to people developing websites: please do not set "user-scalable=no" in the viewport meta tag, as this prevents users from pinch-zooming the page.

Many designers think "there's no need to allow zooming", but this is often coming from people who are blessed with youth and/or great eye-sight. A lot of people (especially as we get older) need to be able to zoom in to read things, or we just want to zoom in on images to be able to see more detail (especially graphics that have text in them).

Fortunately, you don't need to set "user-scalable=no" in order to reap the benefits of the "no tap delay" (thank you to the webkit team for hearing people's feedback about this and changing course from their original plan which was to only disable tap delay when page wasn't scalable).

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I don't even know why this is an option that web sites can control.

I should be able to zoom anything I want, site "design" be damned.

It actually ruined the iPad experience for me. Early on, when you could pan and resize any part of a page, it was great; then sites suddenly decided they should "help" me scroll, choose the text size, etc. and the iPad screen ended up feeling like a penalty box.

It is important for things like HTML5 games that essentially wouldn't work without this functionality.

Then they should have had a big fat "begin playing game" button for the browser, and turned it off the rest of the time. The user should still be in control.

You can easily write a bookmarklet which you can tap that would replace any viewport meta tag with a viewport tag that allowed zooming, but as has been mentioned in other thread where this topic comes up - almost invariably the mobile browser software _already has_ a convenient user override built in. Find it and toggle it.

I understand "because games" (which are already a horrible abuse of what was initially intended as a way to display hyper-text), but far too often I wander onto some news site or blog that thinks it knows what size text I find most comfortable to read. Honestly, if you're trying to present text in the best way possible, make it easy for readers to choose both font size and column width. This lets readers adjust to suit their visual acuity and reading distance. A lot of sites seem to be designed to prevent both.

The great thing about iOS (and OS X) is that full screen zoom is trivial to enable and has a very simple shortcut:

Settings > General > Accessibility > Zoom

I set the zoom region to full screen. The three finger double tap is a good enough shortcut.

On OS X I use the same feature with Ctrl+Scroll to zoom anywhere on the screen. You can even toggle whether pixel interpolation is used (great if you are checking artwork and want to keep the individual pixels crisp).

I rely on these features, even though I have no trouble with my eyesight. They are wonderful and work everywhere.

The OS-wide accessibiliy zooming is just pixel zooming, though. When I zoom the viewport in a browser, it re-renders the fonts and may even show more detail on the images (assuming the images were sized down to begin with). I also still have the toolbars at the top and bottom of the screen.

I agree with you on the triple-finger tap/Ctrl+Scroll options. I use them all the time to check things out, but I still want my iOS web pages to be pinch-able no matter what the website wants

That's right. A designer who uses `user-scalable: no` is consciously taking that interaction away from you. And in general the result is sub-par, web apps which limit the viewport feel cheap and tacky.

It's a useful feature — mainly for apps which render say, an "About" page using a web view but want to make it look like a regular app page.

It's a useful feature that necessitates slower response to taps. One has to pick one or the other.

If you write your css to support dynamic type (in the case of iOS); zooming becomes less valuable as an accessibility feature.

No, it isn't because my original iPad (a.k.a. worst ripoff of the decade) is tethered to iOS 5 and can barely do anything. In fact, the fancier web sites that try to "help" me are now more prone to crashing the browser entirely.

>Standard accessibility disclaimer to people developing websites: please do not set "user-scalable=no" in the viewport meta tag, as this prevents users from pinch-zooming the page.

100% this. I immediately leave any site that I don't absolutely have to use if it doesn't allow me to pinch, and I'm not visually impaired. Part of the annoyance is knowing that they disabled it on purpose. I realize that there are design considerations that factor into it, but the fact that they designed the site in a way that disables such critical functionality makes me not want to stick around to find out whatever other annoyances it has in store for me.

Do you stop using native apps that you can't zoom?

While it is a shame native apps are so often much more limited in usability than webpages, the grandparent does point out that part of the annoyance is disabling it on purpose.

Zoom in native would be great but it's something you have to implement, not a feature you get for free that you explicitly go out of your way to remove.

Most of the sites employing this are aiming at providing more "app-y" experiences, though - and apps don't allow you to zoom in that way. I'd love to see browsers allow you to tap into OS-level accessibility settings easily, and set the font size to match the OS, etc.

That's weird. I could have sworn it should work to avoid setting an absolute font size, but trying it just now on my Android phone (kitkat, I think) and it didn't work. Is this something I'm misremembering? I thought you could do this on desktop, at least.

iOS 9 added that https://webkit.org/blog/3709/using-the-system-font-in-web-co...

But not sizing specifically, right? It looks like I can use the system typeface but not my own typeface at system size.

It looks like it supports sizing:

> "Going beyond the system font, iOS has dynamic type behavior, which can provide an additional level of fit and finish to your content. These text styles identify more than simply a particular font family; instead, they represent an entire style, including size and weight. "

Note that "dynamic type" in Apple vernacular refers specifically to the variable-sizing accessibility feature, so I'm pretty sure this does what you'd want.

There is truth to that, but there are also publications and other sites who shouldn't be doing it. And they do it so they can put their stupid bar across the top of the page and crap like that.

> A lot of people (especially as we get older) need to be able to zoom in to read things,

At least on Android, Chrome has an accessibility setting which forces pinch zooming to be always available. (Not arguing your point though.)

That's not so useful per-se on iOS, as iOS has a full set of zooming features, that range from double-tap-with-three-fingers to activate zooming mode, to the always-on-top zoom controller that popups a menu with several options, including which filters to apply in the zooming window (eg: contrast, b&w). These features work across the whole operating system, so in all apps, not just the browser.

What should be the standard disclaimer to all web developers: don't override any defaults. The iOS designers understand everything better than you and every time you disable zooming or change scrolling behavior an angel gets its wings clipped.

I still have 20/20 vision, and I loathe websites that won't let me zoom.

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