---
name: Resize text
slug: resize-text
category: accessibility
status: published
created: 2026-08-21T00:00:00.000Z
modified: 2026-08-21T00:00:00.000Z
definition: Text must scale to at least 200 percent without loss of content or
  function, which rules out fixed pixel heights around wrapping copy.
aliases:
  - name: text-only zoom
    source: community
  - name: browser zoom
    source: community
  - name: 200% text
    source: wcag
  - name: user font size
    source: community
tags:
  - wcag
relations:
  contrastWith:
    - dynamic-type
    - reflow
    - screen-magnification
    - text-spacing
  variantOf: []
  partOf: []
  seeAlso:
    - images-of-text
implementations: []
sources:
  - title: "WCAG 2.2: Resize Text"
    url: https://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG22/#resize-text
demo: inline
exhibit: false
useWhen: the reader has enlarged text, not the whole page
---

Success criterion 1.4.4 asks that text can be scaled to 200 percent with nothing lost:
no content cut off, no control that can no longer be operated, no label sliding out from
under its own button. The reader is not making the window smaller and not asking for a
different layout. They are asking for bigger letters in the same boxes, and the boxes
have to give.

The distinction that decides most implementations is text-only zoom against full page
zoom. Full page zoom, the browser's own keyboard shortcut, scales everything at once:
type, padding, images, and the CSS pixel itself, which is why layouts usually survive it
and why teams testing only that way conclude they pass. Text-only zoom, which lives in
the browser's font settings and in the operating system's, scales the type and leaves the
box widths where they were. That is the harder case, and it is the one this criterion is
really about, because the growth happens inside a container that did not grow with it.

What survives it is type sized in relative units against containers with no fixed height.
Set font sizes in `rem` so the reader's browser font size actually multiplies through,
give containers `min-height` rather than `height`, centre a button's label with padding
instead of a pixel `line-height`, and let rows wrap. The classic breakages are a card with
`height: 120px`, a nav item that keeps its label on one line with `white-space: nowrap`,
and text centred inside a fixed-height pill: at 200 percent the words are still there in
the DOM and the reader cannot see them, which is exactly the loss the criterion names.

Its sibling criterion is a different measurement of the same discomfort:
[reflow](/reflow) (1.4.10) is about 400 percent zoom, where the requirement is one column
at 320 CSS pixels and no two-dimensional scrolling, while this one is about 200 percent
text in the layout you already have. Passing one does not pass the other, and both are
worth a pass through before shipping a dense screen.