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fontsize vs. window width and line length

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From: Nick Levinson
Date: Sep 23, 2017 7:57PM

A minimum fontsize is usually agreed on for accessibility. However, when the viewport gets so narrow that many words get hyphenated and often hyphenated in several places, in extreme cases where a viewport is only wide enough for a few letters, which makes text hard to read, when is a smaller font size acceptable as a trade-off to maintain accessibility? I design down to a viewport width of 50px since that's the narrowest the Firefox browser supported (I'm not sure newer versions do), although I don't happen to know of any physical device that narrow (some smartwatches might allow 320px wide). I see advice for an ideal body line length of 66 characters (including punctuation and spaces) or half that for small devices (<https://blog.prototypr.io/how-to-set-perfect-line-lengths-for-the-web-528f08f8b344#.tzzk9wrgf>, as accessed 2-18-17), but ideal is useless for narrow viewports, yet a tiny fontsize is also useless anywhere. Are any numbers recommended?
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Nick