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.
- Text Resize in Browser: Video Tutorial (CC)
- Video Tutorial: Larger Version (.mov, CC)
- Directions (HTML)
- Print Directions (Tagged PDF)
The options for zoom in Internet Explorer are found under Page on the application toolbar:
- Zoom In or Control + to zoom in.
- Zoom Out or Control – to zoom out.
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.
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.
To access the zoom options for Google Chrome on Windows, first choose the Page Options button on the toolbar.
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.
