Caveats: I suck at accessibility, so I am probably wrong on a lot of things.
Chrome 32 on Android removes the 300ms delay on touch events for responsive sites. This disables double-tap zoom, leaving pinch to zoom the only way to zoom content. This is an accessibility concern, as for some users double tap zoom may have been the only way they were able to zoom web pages.
For unimpaired users, a 300ms delay on link clicks/interactions with sites provides no benefit, and creates a sluggish UI. Many website owners, aware of the impacts of slow UIs, and trying to compete with native apps, used tools like FastClick to override this behaviour by removing the delay. Removing the delay at the browser level negates the need for tools like fastclick, makes chrome feel faster (competitive win for chrome I guess), and improves performance overall as fastclick has scroll performance implications.
A portion of users, who find pinch-to-zoom difficult, will now potentially be left out of the web. While businesses might not be bothered in the short term, this is clearly not a long term good for the web/society.
Chrome 30 on android has an option to force allow zooming on all sites as an accessibility option. If this still exists in Chrome 32, I'd argue this may actually be a step forewards for accessibility. Why?:
- Currently, "dumb" website owners use fast click to disable the 300ms delay: which even with "force allow zooming" enabled breaks double tap zoom.
- As the 300ms delay goes away, website owners can remove fast click, as it will be redundant, which, assuming chrome keeps "force allow zooming" will mean that double tap zoom works again.
Now, the above means that impaired users have to enable an accessibility setting to be able to use their browser, which is a bummer, but at least it puts them back in control if we get rid of hacks like fast click.
Sorry, haven't had much time to add to this as I'm currently sacrificing what little remains of my cognitive facilities at the alter of browser versions (this is just for Android Browser: http://decadecity.net/blog/2013/11/21/android-browser-versions ). Apologies in advance if I sound ranty, it's ont personal - just that I haven't had time to think the edges off my opinions :-)
The issue here isn't just fastclick and it's ilk - there's a much bigger issue with disabling zoom in the viewport.
My main (half formed) issue here is that in order to solve a (minor UI?) problem for an unknown number of users (but a lot of developers - not users, I'd like to see some RUM data for this issue), the received wisdom in the twitter echo chamber of the "web celbs"* is to use something that one of them cooked up and the others proclaimed as unicorn shit good but has more serious problems for a another unknown number of users. the intersection between the people "fixing" the first problem and the people impacted by the side effects of their "fix" is ~0. the other issue is that for the people hit by the side effects it can make the difference between using the web or not whereas the "fix" makes it a tiny bit better for people who already have no difficulty using the web. because the high (trigger warning: sexism) priests of the echo chamber proclaimed it as "best practice" it's now been cargo culted so much that the major mobile operating system vendor has had to include a fix for the fix as a setting in their flag ship browser.
We can't keep breaking the web this badly as a side effect of "correcting" browsers' default behavior that we don't agree with - with power comes responsibility and we're behaving too irresponsibly to be trusted with the power we have.
OK, back to the mountains of browser analytics madness. (That's a Cuthulu reference not a mental health joke: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/At_the_Mountains_of_Madness )