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Re: IE doesn't increase font-size in px

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From: Alastair Campbell
Date: Apr 15, 2013 2:41AM

Angela French wrote:

> I'm doing some accessibility testing on a new web app and Zooming works
> really well in used on site designed using responsive design techniques.
>

In general, a responsive design should work very well for someone who needs
to zoom in.

In testing with people who zoom in to roughly 200% (not using a magnifier)
they effectively used the mobile-sized version. NB: They didn't realise
that they had a different view, it just seemed to be big, clear and quite
linear!

The one caveat for now is that webkit has a bug [1] where media queries
don't trigger on zoom. However, that appears to be fixed [2], so should
filter through to Chrome & Safari soon.

Overall, I don't think pixel-sizing text is an accessibility issue any
more, unless you've still got a significant number of IE6 users.

The default make things bigger in desktop browsers is zoom, and in mobile
browsers you don't tend to get that much control. (E.g. setting text bigger
in the settings doesn't seem to affect Safari.)

In fact, given a responsive design, I'm not sure what problem text-only
sizing solves?

-Alastair

1] http://alastairc.ac/2012/01/zooming-bug-in-webkit/
2]
https://github.com/igrigorik/http-client-hints/issues/3#issuecomment-14632454