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Having the individual elements on my screen scale and then reflow just from zooming in seems on the surface like a very confusing user experience, without knowing what your end goal is. If your goal is just accessibility for an average webpage then I definitely would say it's not worth it. If it's more of a custom gesture-driven app you could look into using the canvas API.
I may not be understanding what you want to do exactly, but at first glance it seems as though you want to alter the effect of the native pinch zoom. Please be very careful before doing something like that as users who are used to pinch/zooming in order to read text or see details due to poor eyesight might get very confused, and have the action they rely on in order to use their device suddenly not work for them.
Thanks for the advice!
The goal was to make pinch-to-zoom enlarge everything (text included) while keeping the layout reflowed, so users with poor vision could see all content at once without horizontal scrolling. But I get now that changing native pinch behavior—especially for accessibility—can cause more harm than good
From my point of view, your goal -- letting users pinch to enlarge font size and other content without introducing horizontal overflow -- could be actually quite beneficial accessibility-wise (personally, I would definitely prefer that over the default "pinch lens" on most sites), but as already suggested, best to play it safe and make it just an opt-in, not breaking the defaults. (Technically, my unqualified guess is it will be quite a challenge, presumably requiring hard disable for the native scale in meta, having custom listener for the pinch gestures, ideally having em-based styles with container queries ready, and just translating gestures to root font-size changes. But keeping the scroll position, making the native↔custom toggle intuitive … these challenges would be the most probably very hard to get right.)
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