Copywriter, technical writer, translator (FR>EN, ES>EN, IT>EN), journalist

Increasing text size in web browsers

Have you ever seen people with poor eyesight hold magnifying glasses to their computer screens? I haven’t either, but I could imagine that happening given how difficult it can be to read certain web sites.

Fortunately, there are easier ways to make web sites easier to read. Browser menus offer zoom options, and certain web pages feature text-sizing tools, often shown as two or three “A”s of different sizes.

Perhaps the easiest text zoom tools offered by Windows- and Mac-based web browsers are the keyboard shortcuts common to them all, much like Ctrl-C copies and Ctrl-V pastes. These shortcuts work on the five browsers I tested: Internet Explorer, Apple Safari, Mozilla Firefox, Opera and Google Chrome.

On Macs, the shortcuts are:

  • Cmd + to increase text size
  • Cmd – to decrease it

On Windows, the shortcuts are

  • Ctrl + to increase text size
  • Ctrl – to decrease it