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The screen it is built on is not the screen it is read on
Pages laid out again for the width they are opened at, readable for somebody who needs bigger text, with photographs sent at the size that screen actually calls for.
What arrives
- Laid out again
- for the width the page is actually opened at
- Nothing important
- overlapping or running off the edge on a small screen
- Buttons
- sized for a thumb rather than for a mouse pointer
- Bigger text
- and stronger contrast for the people who need them
- Photographs
- sent at the size that screen calls for, not at full size
- Opened on a real phone
- before it goes out, not only on the machine it was built on
The screen it is actually opened on#
The desktop version is the one the business owner looks at, because that is what is on the desk. The phone version is the one almost everybody else gets, and it is the one that decides whether they call.
So the layout is not shrunk. It is arranged again for the width it finds itself at, which is why a price table becomes a list rather than a thing you pinch and drag.
Readable is not the same as visible#
Text that is technically on the screen and too small to read has not been delivered. The same is true of pale grey on white, which looks restrained in a design and disappears in daylight. It stays readable for somebody with older eyes, on a bus, holding a coffee.
Where this stops#
There is no such thing as every screen. There are more devices, browsers and text settings than anybody can hold, and new ones arrive without asking. What I can honestly say is that it is built to bend rather than to a fixed set of sizes, and that it is opened on a real phone before it goes out rather than only in a window on my desk.
And the last word belongs to the visitor. Somebody who has set their own text larger, or turned on their own high-contrast mode, gets what they asked for - which is correct, and which will occasionally look nothing like the design. That trade is made deliberately, in their favour.
Answered at length on the site