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Comment by staplers | Hacker News Reader

  Every "mobile friendly" menu site is able to show maybe 5 items on the page at once

This is due to accessibility regulations. Apple design guidelines and Material guidelines explicitly state how small font can and should be. Ask any designer you know.

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Not necessarily; WCAG doesn’t actually mandate a minimum font size, only that your fonts respect the user zoom and font size settings.

But is it right to punish everyone else because of accessibility reasons?

Is it right that I was downvoted heavily for stating a fact?

No, that is not right at all.

My phone has a text size setting, and if I needed bigger text for readability I could set it - why can't we have that conveyed as a user preference somehow?

You just said it yourself. Your phone provides that preference. But a good default is essential, and given to us based on Apple and Googles research, which was probably actually done by Nielsen Norman Group

I'm glad my betters dictate what can be done.

The "good default" should be the default size that the browser uses, in my opinion. The designer of the website is not in a position to know what the best font size is.

No, there are physical limits, and those are the ones determining mobile screens.

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