Hacker News is a terribly designed website and just plain unreadable without zoom. 12px might have been the standard 15 years ago, but most sites use larger sizes. Gmail and old Reddit are using 14px. The New York Times and Washington Post are using 20px (and those are usually longer reads). The fact that you can zoom and override fonts does not give people a right to design unreadable/inaccessible websites.

>does not give people a right to design unreadable/inaccessible websites.

They aren't as the rendering of a website is ultimately always controlled by the client/visitor.

Any website whose semantic is only made of text is infinitely more accessible than another that would use bigger fonts but would include images or content that only render if javascript is activated.

And ultimately, they have every right to make it the way they want.

> Washington Post are using 20px (and those are usually longer reads)

In the full text maybe, I find much smaller fonts than those on computer.rip in metadatas and subtitles.

Some users don't know how to use their browser's zoom feature. Most don't know how to change the default font in their browser, and those that do might not want to do this in case some sites break because of bad assumptions. Others don't like zoom, because it makes images look blurry. The default appearance of the page should be usable and accessible by an average user.

And yes, the 20px font applies to the full text. I'm not arguing that smaller fonts should be banned, things like metadata don't need to be as large. But the main content of the page should be larger and comfortably readable.

The average user use prescription glasses if he has eyesights issues.

I've been wearing glasses since I was 6 or 7y old.

I’m wearing glasses too, and they are of the correct power for my needs (as measured by an optometrist). That does not make HN less unusable and the posted page less uncomfortable at 100% zoom from the recommended viewing distance.

> They aren't as the rendering of a website is ultimately always controlled by the client/visitor.

This true in a technical sense, but not in a practical sense. If you want me to stay on your website, you'd better put in the effort to make it usable and readable. It's not the user's job to design the website, it's the job of the damn website designer!

This is why you should do more CSS with rems and respecting the user agent's size so it's easier for folks to get the size they want (this article's author used ems and defaults though)