iOS / mobile safari still zooms while viewport is set to user-scalable=no ? Check Accessibility settings!

Question

This specific Mobile Safari (seemingly impossible and yet undocumented) problem kept me going for a long long time today, and I was just about to post a question about it he

Answer 1

As someone with vision problems I'm heavily reliant on being able to zoom mobile sites. Now with the update to iOS 5 there's no way of getting iOS to ignore the user-scalable setting anymore and I suddenly discover I can't use half the web sites I use regularly anymore because I can't zoom them.

So, on behalf of people with vision problems, I beg you to please not use viewport meta tags to restrict peoples' ability to zoom your site!

Answer 2

I then found the great iPad CSS Layout with Landscape/Portrait Modes demo. It looked promising, but gave me the identical problem. Yet while testing this on a second iPad it worked perfect: no zooming problem whatsoever. So, we figured it had to do with my specific iPad.

Then it struck me: Weeks ago I fiddled around with the accessibility settings. Zooming in on the entire interface like you can do in OSX (ctrl+scroll) etc. Maybe this was linked to Mobile Safari in some way? Well, it turns out it is.

Today I learned: When Accessibility > Zoom is turned on, this overrules the meta viewport settings.

Try this out yourself? You'll find it here: Settings > General > Accessibility > Zoom

Answer 3

Just a little update for you: this has been fixed by Apple. As of iOS 5 beta 1, the Zoom accessibility setting will no longer cause the viewport meta tag to be ignored.

Answer 4

Note: use commas as separators, not semicolons. The clean way are commas as separators. See the documentation page http://developer.apple.com/library/safari/#documentation/AppleApplications/Reference/SafariHTMLRef/Articles/MetaTags.html, they do use commas too. And at least Chrome shows errors in the console if you use semicolons. I know, that this does not affect iPad or safari, but if you can do it clean, why not? :)