Unless you have bionic eyes, at one point or another a computer screen will become difficult to read. For most of us, we’ll reach for glasses or call to make an appointment for an eye exam. But at some point, the glasses just aren’t enough.
I just got my first pair of bifocals. I’ve been using two pairs of glasses – one for distance and one for reading. Before I got the bifocals I had already increased the resolution of my monitor to 125%. All of this to put less strain on my eyes while reading.
And that is the core reason for 1.4.4 Resize Text.
Following WCAG’s QuickRef, we see:
Except for captions and images of text, text can be resized without assistive technology up to 200 percent without loss of content or functionality.
Without assistive technology our digital assets need to increase their font size to 200%. PDFs you can zoom in on to increase the font size. To test in a browser, press CTRL or CMD and the Plus key. The browser will show you the zoom level as you do this.
Now with the page zoomed to 200%, we need to look for the following:
- Are any controls hidden or otherwise inaccessible?
- Is any content cut off?
- Do I need to scroll in two dimensions?
- Is the design broken?
You should have no problems if you’ve ensured that your fonts and containers use relative sizing like EM, REM, or percentage. This also includes viewport width or height. Text and containers will resize smoothly.
It’s 2025. Not all applications are feasible on mobile, but we need to rid ourselves of this thinking. It’s 2025 and there are so many screens in the world, we will never know what the user has. We must make our interfaces flexible. Responsive design is not “feature” we add on to be nice. It is a requirement.
Users with low vision don’t start with third-party assistive tech. They start with what they can adjust on their device. When they zoom in from 1280×1024 to 200%, the view should match what is seen on a mobile device. Comparatively, this device would have a 640×512 pixel resolution.
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