There has been some debate in the web accessibility community as to whether it is a good practice to provide text resizing widgets on web pages. One opinion on this topic is that users should learn how to resize the text using the zoom options provided by the web browser, as not every web page will have text resize widgets. In this tutorial, you will learn how to zoom the text and layout in the most popular Windows web browsers: Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Google Chrome.


The options for zoom in Internet Explorer are found under Page on the application toolbar:
Page menu on Internet Explorer 8 toolbar.

  • Zoom In or Control + to zoom in.
  • Zoom Out or Control – to zoom out.

Zoom options found under Page, Zoom in Internet Explorer 8.

You can also choose a zoom level from the menu.

To resize only the text, choose Text Size followed by one of the size options listed on the submenu. These range from Largest, to Medium (the default), to Smallest.
Text size options found under Page, Text size in internet Explorer 8.
Firefox for Windows has the following zoom options in the View menu:

  • Zoom, Zoom In or Control + to zoom in.
  • Zoom, Zoom Out or Control – to zoom out.
  • Zoom, Reset or Control 0 to reset the view.
  • Zoom, Zoom Text Only to resize the text without affecting the layout when you use the zoom options.

Zoom options found under View, Zoom menu in Firefox for Windows.

To access the zoom options for Google Chrome on Windows, first choose the Page Options button on the toolbar.
Page options button on toolbar of Google Chrome for Windows
From the Page Options menu, you can choose Zoom, Larger to zoom in, Zoom, Smaller to zoom out, and Zoom, Normal to return to the default view. The keyboard shortcuts for these options are the same as on the other browsers: Control + to zoom in, Control – to zoom out, and Control 0 for Reset.
Zoom options found under Page options, Zoom in Google Chrome for Windows.

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