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Comment by account42 | Hacker News Reader

> 16px. The minimum size of text you should have on any site is 16px. Anything lower than that and you’ll make things hard to read on the web.

Hard disagree, especially for "any site". Hacker News for example uses 12px text and is perfectly readable - if it isn't for you then you shuold be using some form of display scaling instead of wasting everyone else's screen space.

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The most important things isn't so much the text size you choose, but that your site doesn't break or try to fight me when I try to manually increase the zoom level or change the text size.

Hacker News is not readable for me. Text is too small, the button for folding the comment tree is impossible to hit on mobile. I'm reading this website with 150% zoom and the browser window that is 50% the width of my screen.

Nevermind 16 or 12, fixed size is to be avoided, from 2010: https://www.w3.org/QA/Tips/font-size

> Hacker News is not readable for me. Text is too small, the button for folding the comment tree is impossible to hit on mobile. I'm reading this website with 150% zoom and the browser window that is 50% the width of my screen.

What is your monitor size, resolution and view distance and do you use any display scaling?

> Nevermind 16 or 12, fixed size is to be avoided, from 2010: https://www.w3.org/QA/Tips/font-size

I agree that using user preferences is a good idea - however then the body text should be always 100% of the user set font size, never > 100%.

The second best option is to have all sites use a consistent fixed size, and that will necessarily have to be the same as the default browser font size and the common font size of older websites - it can't change just because the average pixel has gotten smaller. Then you can get your desired font size setting a default zoom option.

Hey guys, thanks for the perspective! (I'm the guy who wrote the article)

You're right, saying "16px minimum for all sites" was wrong. I have no idea where I heard the phrase "16px is minimum for accessibility", but I guess that just stuck in my head, and since I even found similar sayings in other sources, I took it to be true.

So umm, fake news I guess?

I revised the article to clarify that and left links that go into more detail on font size.

Thanks again. I appreciate everyone voicing their opinions.

I run HN at a perpetual 120% (though admittedly not the 133% which would boost 9pt to 16px), because otherwise it’s wildly out of place in my internet experience.

(And then I dislike it when the window gets narrow enough that the mobile styles kick in, which boost the font size a bit.)

Whereas I have Chrome set to default to 90%, and have some individual sites set as small as 60%, specifically because too many site designers seem to have drunk the 16pt cool-aid and not tried using their own site in a half-screen-width browser window on a 13 laptop screen.

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