As a user, you can force allow zooming:
In Firefox find the settings, select “Accessibility” and activate “Zoom on all website”
In Chrome find the settings, select “Accessibility” and check “Force enable zoom”
Without zoom disabled 5 people putting their fingers on a screen looks a lot like a pinch gesture. Disabling the default event handlers only works some of the time.
This is a common problem with the web, we can't have nice things because people use them poorly.
Pro tip: Double tap for a few more options.
I've never been able to zoom on mobile apps.
At least one person wanted it: me.
Anyone can find the secret override setting if they're motivated, but that's not a solution to the problem.
I know web developers don't care, but they're still the ones that can actually solve the problem. It's possible that like many other abused web features, Google will eventually change the setting for this feature from "override website zoom settings" to "respect website preferences for zooming" with "off" as a default.
It seems like that battle is already lost, this isn't some default setting that they are just accepting, web developers are doing it because they think they have a good reason, some random blog post isn't going to change their minds.
Bringing this to developers' attention might very well be enough to get tons of people to remove the zoom block from their websites.
The disadvantage of being disabled doesn’t come from the way that disability limits us as much as it comes from the countless ways it makes all the normal things people do slightly harder.
Advocates fight to change these things not because it’s easy to do but because eliminating at least some of the hurdles in life makes our overall experience a little easier.
I think it cultivates a healthy mindset though: At an early age, you learn that all assymetric tools were designed by idiots, so by kindergarten, you're already questioning everything.
I suspect this is why lefties are drastically overrepresented in leadership positions, NASA, etc.
Source: https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2015/beyond-bls/left-versus-rig...
According to the research, “lefties are generally born with a different brain structure that negatively affects their social and cognitive abilities.”
I really like this line of thinking because I think abled people are often overwhelmed by the prospect of disability. I bet left-handedness is the sort of impairment that people can get their head around as a starting point.
I’ve tried using my vision impairment (which requires a low to moderate level of support) to describe the same thing, but peoples’ eyes tend to glaze over as soon as I say “amblyopia”. :-P
Then you have learned the wrong lession. Assymetric tools might not be inclusive, but they are generally designed that way because it brings some kind of advantage.
The entire article barely scratches 250 words. I don't think anything can be considered 'buried' in what is basically a medium-sized paragraph.
In lieu of that, maybe consider having an "accessibility options" cta on first interaction.
For not disabling zoom the header does not even help because developers blindly copy pasting the <meta name="viewport" ...> line so that broken by default mobile browsers won't fuck up their responsive design are not going to handle that header.
Like many accessibility issues, zoom is not something that only benefits a subset of the popultaion. The solution is to no disable zoom for anyone except the 0.01% of pages (only very specific web apps really) where zoom does not make any sense AND interferes with some other behavior (e.g. multi touch).