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Comment by polotics | Hacker News Reader

A simple rule: Minimum font size >= Age of oldest attendee

I think 20 years olds can read fonts smaller than 20 light years just fine. In facts, font that big may in fact be rather troublesome…

Depends, if those fonts are used in a galaxy far, far away the angular size will still be small.

What about giving websites and web apps the ability to detect the font size preference of the user to automatically adjust the font size?

Just like native apps do...?

Websites have that ability, both in CSS with types that are defined relative to the users set font size, and to detect it in JS. The platforms capability is not the problem here.

This. HTML was actually created to be accessible by default. One needs to make an effort (unfortunately not very big effort) to break it.

Hmm really? How do you do that? The `rem` and `em` CSS units do not reflect iOS font-size settings if this is what you mean (I don't know about Android).

It's true that mobile Safari seems to lack a setting for default font size or what Mac Safari has, a minimum font size setting.

It does have a default Page Zoom setting and it will remember Page Zoom changes per-domain (e.g. I have this site set to 115%).

There is a way for web sites to make use of iOS's Dynamic Type setting [0] to make text larger, but it's up to each site's author to include the requisite values in their CSS.

[0] https://www.interactiveaccessibility.com/blog/text-resizing-...

1 rem is supposed to be the font size of the root element. 1 em is the font size of the parent. If a browser isn't implementing those in such a manner then it seems like it would be a bug.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Learn/CSS/Building_...

Does Safari not have a UI for the user to set a font-size preference? Most browser do.

Even native apps are often broken when you enable "large fonts". I've used large fonts since forever and even now are using 1440p on 32" screen (I'm not wearing glasses or anything).

What do you mean?

Browsers are native apps, so they already do that for websites.

Maybe 10*log(max({ages})). But really, configurability is usually better.

I think if you applied this literally it'd be pretty patronizing ;)

Relax. He works at a day care center.

This doesn't make much sense to me. I have coworkers who are 50+ years old, so are you saying everything should be size 50 font? That seems pretty ridiculous and kind of like mocking them.

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