If you have Chrome Canary installed with the 'Experimental Web Platform features' flag enabled, you can now try out a new HTML meta tag:
< meta name = " text-scale " content = " scale " />
This is a feature that I proposed at the CSS Working Group back in Summer 2024 and developed with a lot of help from David Grogan and Philip Rogers from the Google Chrome team. You can read the full explainer here. I'm delighted that is finally in the CSS Fonts 5 specification and supported in a browser behind a flag!
What is it? permalink
Have you ever noticed that when you increase the system text size in your iOS or Android phone's accessibility settings, the text gets bigger everywhere except on the web?
On Safari and Chrome, it makes absolutely no difference.
Interestingly though, on Firefox for Android, the browser does a full page zoom. But that's very different to text scaling.
And that's not great, because research by Appt shows around 37% of Android users and 34% of iOS users have changed their system-level text scale factor from the default. And web developers currently have no way to respect that.
The new tag is here to fix that. Just like how the tag tells the browser that your website is designed to work for small viewport sizes, the tells the browser, 'Hey, I've designed my website to still work if the user increases their OS text size.'
The plan is: once you have on your page, the text will respect the user's text size preference.
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