With my eyes not being what they used to be, I find I often need to zoom in read some mobilesites, esp. crazy ones that have embedded screen shots and such that are just too tiny to read.

However, I keep running into sites that refuse to zoom so I took a peek at their source and found this little line of code that just about made me lose my mind:

<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0, maximum-scale=1.0, user-scalable=no" />

It blocks people that need to zoom from being able to do so and I find it equally as heinous that Firefox supports such a command.

I didn't check Chrome or Safari, but the fact that it exists leads me to believe others probably support is as well which explains sites that refuse to zoom.

So here you are using your phone with no way to read the site.

Since it's deliberate, it's like they're deliberately telling people with bad eyes to go coitus themselves.

Makes me really tempted to forward a few domains to some blind rights groups or the ACLU just to show them what I think of that line of HTML and ruin their day.

Some accessibility issues I can live with, so you didn't add ALT text or something, but I can find workarounds.

But when it's a deliberate block to stop someone from being able to use accessibility tools, specifically ZOOM which is used by most over 40 plus everyone with eye problems.

Based on my recent web surfing it's an egregious trending practice that makes using more than a few sites inaccessible on mobile on purpose!

Why would anyone deliberately do that or is it just some web hack copied the code that doesn't know what that line of HTML is actually doing in the browser?

Either way, that line of code should be able to be disabled in the browser if it isn't already, or someone will need to set up a proxy site just to filter that for the vision impaired.

When I see things like this I just shake my head and wonder what people are thinking and the answer is obvious, they aren't.