Designing for User Font-size and Zoom
July 28, 2025
When I tried setting my browser font-size preferences, I found it broke more sites than it improved, and I quickly moved back to the default. So what went wrong, and how can we fix it?
Browsers are also known as ‘user agents’ (hence ‘UA strings’–the UA stands for ‘user agent’). In the W3C’s ‘priority of constituencies‘, user’s needs com before those of others like developers.
Many users with vision impairment (which includes most people as we age) rely on this principle to interact with websites, setting their own preference for font sizes, and even fonts, in some cases creating their own user style sheets.
But how does that work in practice? Not so well. Here Miriam Suzanne explore why and what we can do about it.
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