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Accessibility

How to stop disabling pinch zoom

Disabling pinch-zoom removes the only way many people with low vision can read a page on a phone. It is a WCAG failure, and the meta tag that causes it is usually copied in without anyone deciding to.

What 13x checks

This is rule accessibility.zoom-enabled in the public registry: Pinch-zoom is not disabled. It runs on every audit, against the pages we actually fetched, and its result is derived from the response rather than estimated.

Surface
Accessibility
Score weight
7 of the readiness score
Scope
Runs on every audited page
Applies
To every site

Registry version 2026-07-30. Every rule is published, and the audit is deterministic — the same page produces the same finding every time.

The fix

The same text the audit hands you when this check fails on your own site.

The viewport tag disables pinch-zoom. Remove the restrictions:

html code
<!-- Blocks zoom -->
<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1, maximum-scale=1, user-scalable=no" />

<!-- Correct -->
<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1" />

This is a WCAG 1.4.4 failure and one of the first things an automated accessibility scan reports. Anyone who needs to magnify text to read it currently cannot.

It is almost always copied from a template written to stop iOS zooming on input focus. The real fix for that is a font size of at least 16px on form fields — iOS only zooms below that.

Framework-specific versions

Where the change differs enough to be worth writing out separately.

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