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Comment by viraptor | Hacker News Reader

If the staff sees this - please stop preventing zoom. Not only is that bad for accessibility, it makes the article less useful for everyone - there's a screenshot included showing off the feature, but it's too small to read on the phone and I can't zoom in.

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Firefox on Android has an accessibility setting called "Zoom on all web sites" that gets around this. Firefox's reader mode would help with this as well.

It's a shame we need these workarounds instead of all websites being accessible by default :/

The original android browser had something much better, zoom until the size was right, double tap to reflow to fit

The new one has an extension that reflows on zoom. https://github.com/emvaized/text-reflow-on-zoom-mobile, it is quite useful.

Nice, I wouldn't want it to be automatic after pinch but that looks promising and I'm sure could be modded, maybe pinch zoom and then if you keep holding the two fingers without moving much for X amount of time it reflows

Yeah, it is sometime annoying when text reflows if you only want to look closer at an image. But most of the time it's not really an issue, you just need to reposition. Maybe give it a try anyway :)

Opera Android does support reflowing.

That's amazing! I'm already on FF on Android and didn't realise they introduced it. Thank you so much. I'll finally be able to see the small images on medium and substack!

Unfortunately there is no per-site override. So you get to the occasional site that you don't want to zoom (like a game where the zoom gesture does something in-game) that is unusable with this global setting enabled :(

Hey - One of our engineers has fixed this. Please try again!

I can look into it. Can you clarify what you mean? Article zooms in normally for me (Orion browser/iOS).

OP might have meant that pinch and zoom is locked in and that’s why they can’t zoom into that screenshot?

Edit: I can zoom in perfectly in my browser - Safari on iPhone - here.

It's blocked on Firefox on Android. Another comment quoted the meta tag which disables it.

Got it. For some reason Bear Blog defaults to this setting, not easy to change from dashboard it seems.

Awesome, thanks for checking it!

Not sure if you mean you work at Kagi, but I also want to add that when opening the Android app, the splash page takes a full second or so to load before the search bar opens, which doesn't sound like much but it makes it harder to habitually use Kagi as my default mobile search.

The Kagi widget technically solves this, but without installing a new launcher I can't replace the native Google search bar with the Kagi one.

What browser prevents this actually? None of the browsers (even mobile) I just quickly tested just... worked? No extensions.

I think Safari just outright ignores the maximum-scale property.

I can zoom in

Android 14 Firefox 136.0.1 (Build #2016078447), hg-e7956a4db6c5+ GV: 136.0.1-20250310180126 AS: 136.0

ublock origin enable zoom in all websites

Edit: I know this is not what you are asking for, but try opening the image in a new tab. Can you zoom in there?

https://kagifeedback.org/assets/files/2025-04-17/1744906741-...

Yeah, I know the workarounds. This is more of a "complain publicly to maybe fix this specific case, but mostly raise awareness for people who will build the next thing".

This has been bugging me as well.

You can open it in a new tab and zoom there.

I can zoom just fine on mobile Safari.

So what?

His complaint is easily verifiable, and valid:

I jumped on this bandwagon long back for preventing horizontal scrollbars and other issues. Is there an updated advice for allowing zoom and being responsive?

“Allowing zoom” and “being responsive” are not two states at odds with one another.

Preventing zooming is a serious accessibility issue and it makes the content worse for every user.

If you’re properly setting responsive widths, a large enough base font size, large enough input text size, and using border-box for box-sizing, things should just work except for cases where you’re absolutely positioning things or telling them not to word wrap and they are wider than the viewport.

There really is no bandwagon to jump onto here—most sites don’t prevent zooming in. Many that do were just misconfigured from the start, and because some popular mobile browsers ignore `maximum-scale=1.0`, the issue isn’t normally identified.

Quick tip: Make sure all of your inputs are at least 16px font size. This will prevent most mobile browsers from “automatically” zooming in when an input is focused ;) Which is a common reason people employ the maximum-scale property.

Kagi employee here. I hate it when sites block zooming. Didn't realize our blog was doing it :S

Our site's been fixed, and I opened a PR upstream.

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