The accessibility of media queries and user choice

The humble media query has given us a lot of power to help target and tame layout and presentation for different screen sizes. That same power though has introduced a problem in that if you wrap your content in a media query it is very much a one way street.

As responsive web design has gained favour, there have been some brilliant examples of optimising designs for smaller screen sizes, which genuinely offer a better experience than leaving it up to the browser to deal with and then using pinching/tapping to zoom. But for every successful small screen layout there’s at least 10 awful ones, which are so painful to use you’d rather take the larger desktop view and struggle through.

The problem is you can’t. Once that media query matches and fires, you get what you’re given and you better bloody well like it. Even if you don’t.

That seems to be like a pretty broken implementation. I’d at least like the choice to see if the experience is better using a different media query than the one that matched my browsing conditions. This seems like something a browser ought to be able to do, in the same way you can kill Javascript or Styles altogether - why not have a user setting for killing certain styles, or choosing to have the site render with a different media query than the one detected.

Web content should be accessible in every sense of the word, forcing content into occasionally subpar experiences defined by a condition that I cant influence, without a way out again feels contrary to that.