Page zoom is fine for relatively minor adjustments, but if you're browsing with a high page zoom setting you'll still run into a ton of problems.
Stuff like "page overlays become so large that they overflow the bounds of the screen, but are fixed position so you can't even scroll them to make the X button visible."
Or in the slightly better case, "most of the screen is obscured by the enlarged floating header, the layout of which is totally broken by the relatively narrow viewport relative to content size, and with your large page zoom setting the remaining half of the screen can fit about five words on it at a time."
Either way websites need to do accessibility testing and clearly most of them don't.
Safari has a setting for "Never use font sizes smaller than __" which used in combination with a not as high page zoom setting is a little less likely to make pages completely fucked, because it's only acting on text that was small to begin with.
There's no expectation that sites ought to work perfectly with 500% zoom, even though a browser supports that as a zoom value. The same way there's no expectation they work with a horizontal viewport size of 50px. Because they're the same thing, and when you push any design too far it breaks. That's just reality.
And with page overlays, text zoom isn't necessarily going to fix anything. Sometimes the button to dismiss is at the bottom, and the larger text will just push that off-screen downwards. (I do agree that pop-ups/overlays designed for a screen larger than yours are a problem, but that's often less about zoom than just assuming small/short phone screens no longer exist.)
500% maybe not, but I've seen sites blow up at much less drastic zoom levels.
The unfortunate reality of accessibility is that there was no expectation of wheelchair ramps until the ADA forced everyone to quit saying "but ramps cost money and I don't personally need that" and do the right thing, web accessibility may end up requiring the same treatment.
If you have vision problems such that sites don't work at the zoom level you need, then you simply need to purchase or use a device with a larger screen. Then the larger zoom level will work, because there's more space for it.
The world adopted responsive design a long time ago to be mobile-friendly. That inherently made page zoom highly effective even at larger levels. If you need to push it to extreme levels, you need to get a larger screen.
And there's always pinch-to-zoom on top if you really need it. Plus screen magnification utilities.
"Just get a bigger screen" is such a lame excuse, and it doesn't even work.
Here's what chatgpt.com looks like on an iPhone 17 Pro Max with the page zoom turned up: https://imgur.com/XXweCSj
It's such an absolutely pathetic use of the viewport space. And this is exactly that kind of thing that giving pages separate text scaling awareness instead of only page zoom will be able to improve. Most of the stuff using up the limited relative viewport size did not need to be enlarged.
Insisting that blind people should accept wasting left and right thirds of their screen space (seriously, look at the size of the chat bubble where you can see a tiny slice of it peeking through) on zooming in the white space and just buy bigger devices that don't even exist to accommodate this, all because uniformly blowing up all page elements is easier for developers is… I'll be polite and say it's not something I agree with.
If that's the level of text size you require, you should be using sites on a large tablet, not a phone. A phone screen isn't large enough for your vision period. This is like expecting a website to be usable on an Apple Watch display. Be reasonable here.
At some point you just have to accept that your vision accommodations need to be met with a combination of hardware and software, not just software alone.
Blind people use phones smaller than this with large text all day long and the inability of web developers to accommodate it is an embarrassing failure of web developers and web platforms.
In the ChatGPT example, the entire interface boils down to a scrolling chat history, a text input box, and a send button. It's hard to imagine an interface that would be easier to fit in a small viewport than this. But the current reliance on full page zoom and poor responsiveness to viewport space (maintaining huge side margins in a narrow window) means it sucks.
Their mobile app works fine with large accessibility text sizes (iOS goes up to 310%). There's no fundamental reason the web shouldn't be able to handle an accessible interface with enlarged text equally well. The current state of web accessibility is just bad.
It can be better, but only if people do the work to make that happen. Curb cuts and wheelchair ramps didn't exist until we built them, and they gave a lot of people with mobility limitations the ability to get around independently. Unfortunately it took heavy handed regulation to force the issue, because so much of the population is content to say "I'm not the one in a wheelchair, why should I care about that?"
My hope would be that enough people in tech do care about accessibility and it won't require that level of regulation. And I'm thankful that Chrome is looking at ways to improve the current situation.
> It's hard to imagine an interface that would be easier to fit in a small viewport than this.
It's a website. We already have responsive design between desktop and mobile. You're essentially asking for a third modality that is essentially purely text and buttons without margins or padding, something that would work for closer to Apple Watch screens. You're showing a case where you need everything 3x larger in each dimension, which gives you nine times less usable space on your screen. Asking interfaces to work in one-ninth the usual space of an already space-constrained phone screen seems unreasonable to me.
If you need 3x magnification in each dimension and want to browse the web, you really just need a larger device. That's an accomodation that exists. Tablets exist. This isn't the equivalent of needing curb cuts and wheelchair ramps, because larger screens are already available for this level of visual disability.
Stuff like "page overlays become so large that they overflow the bounds of the screen, but are fixed position so you can't even scroll them to make the X button visible."
Or in the slightly better case, "most of the screen is obscured by the enlarged floating header, the layout of which is totally broken by the relatively narrow viewport relative to content size, and with your large page zoom setting the remaining half of the screen can fit about five words on it at a time."
Either way websites need to do accessibility testing and clearly most of them don't.
Safari has a setting for "Never use font sizes smaller than __" which used in combination with a not as high page zoom setting is a little less likely to make pages completely fucked, because it's only acting on text that was small to begin with.