fucking font size

To whom it concerns,
STOP FUCKING WITH MY FONT SIZE
Frustrated reader

Despite a familial tendency towards needing glasses, nothing like poor sight or dyslexia affects my reading ability. As a result, the default font size of the vast majority of websites is perfectly serviceable for me.

I do happen across sites that want to tell me so much they turn the font size all the way down, sometimes as low as a barbaric 12px. This is easy to deal with, though. ctrl + + on a computer will scale up the page, while pinching will zoom if I'm reading on a mobile. ^[0]

You know what's less manageable? When sites scale up their font size. Ironically, I've had the worst experiences on the sites of accessibility advocates who've cranked their font size so high that they can only fit four words to a line on mobile. That's really annoying because you can't zoom out on mobile (ctrl + - works on a computer though). This grinds my gears because not only do they know better, they preach better. Fuck those guys. ^[1]

If I visit a website with a poor font size often enough then I'll override the font size using a user style sheet. This lets me write custom CSS that overpowers the site's own styles. Unfortunately, they're a pain to set up, so I use a broswer extension. I won't be recommending an extension because you have to grant them invasive priviledges and I have not done due diligence.

My dream is that browsers supply us with a native way to tweak important site styles with ease. They already support changing the base font size for all websites, buried in a menu, so it seems reasonable to ask that we be allowed to change it for websites as needed. Maybe in the meantime I should create my own browser extension. Looking at my list of project ideas, I should be able to get that done in a few years' time if I retire now. Stay tuned for the release!