Pinch-to-zoom enabled
Silktide checks that your pages allow visitors on mobile devices to zoom in with a pinch gesture. Zooming is how many people make text large enough to read, and pages can, regrettably, switch it off.
Why this matters
Huge numbers of people zoom in on their phones routinely - anyone with less than perfect eyesight, which with age becomes most of us. A page that disables pinch-to-zoom leaves them squinting at text they cannot enlarge, and for people with low vision it can make the page unusable. WCAG success criterion 1.4.4 ( of ) requires that text can be resized up to 200%, and on mobile, zoom is the mechanism that delivers that.
Disabling zoom is almost never intentional design - it usually ships inside a copy-pasted template tag.
How to fix it
Remove the zoom restrictions from your page's tag:
<!-- Zoom disabled: users cannot enlarge the page -->
<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0,
maximum-scale=1.0, user-scalable=no">
<!-- Fixed: users can pinch-to-zoom freely -->
<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0">
Both user-scalable=no and a restrictive maximum-scale prevent zooming;
remove both. The viewport tag usually lives in your site template, so one edit
typically fixes every page.
How Silktide tests this
- Load the page as a mobile device and find its viewport tags in the .
- Report any viewport tag that prevents zooming, either by declaring
user-scalable=noor by setting amaximum-scaleat or below the page's initial scale.
Troubleshooting
I can zoom the page fine on my iPhone
iOS ignores attempts to disable pinch-to-zoom, so the page will still zoom on an iPhone. Android browsers respect the restriction, so the problem is real for a large share of your visitors - test on an Android device to see it.
Why fix it if iOS ignores it?
Because Android does not, and because the tag signals intent that some browsers, embedded webviews, and assistive tools still honor. The code serves no purpose; removing it has no downside.