Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Magnify browser's viewport (typically "pinch-zoom")" That is exactly what is disabled when authors disable zoom via the meta property.
Right, but it's not what the relevant accessibility standard focuses on. It's the difference between zooming the whole page and making just the text bigger (i.e. through a browser's minimum font size setting), and it's only the former that's affected by meta viewport tags, no?
As some who also has terrible vision -- dedicated text sizing is awesome, but being able to just pinch-zoom makes ALL the difference for me. So many aspects of a web page are hard to use other than just text as well. (Those "X" close icons can get pretty damn hard to decipher at times.)
No solution is perfect, but allowing zooming is simple and a huge win for me. (Even if the site still has a sticky header that wont get out of the way...)