Loss of iOS Pinch-Zoom Functionality

By Peter Smyth, 11 November, 2014

Forum
Low Vision Accessibility on Apple Products

Since late 2013, I have noted an increasing number of websites that no longer support pinch - zoom. These are full sites, not mobile versions. They fail to respond to the Request Desktop Version option in iOS 8.1 Safari.
These include but are not limited to
The New York Times
The Washington Post
The Post and Courier (my local paper)
TechCrunch

Please note that the lack of support shows up in articles, but may be present on the home pages.

This problem is caused by using a "responsive" template for the pages; this can be avoided, which I do when doing Wordpress sites.

Although there are workarounds, this is an easy to fix issue that denies low-visioned users full-functionality. Apple is aware of the problem.

Options

Comments

By Dave on Friday, November 21, 2014 - 17:39

Is it easy to fix for the developers or the users?

I've noticed it too, very annoying.

By Peter Smyth on Friday, November 21, 2014 - 17:39

In reply to by Dave

Dave, sorry. It should be easy for the website designers. I noticed this appeared when several of the papers pages started looking alike, which suggests a template. "Responsive" templates identify iPad as a mobile device and lose some functionality. The fix would be for the developer to use a different template or do a little coding changes.

A cardinal rule of web ding is to test a site on as many different platforms as possible. I've communicated my frustration to a couple of these papers.

My workaround is the three finger tap to zoom.