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Re: Browser zooming sufficient for WCAG 1.4.4 (resize text)

for

From: _mallory
Date: Jun 29, 2015 10:17PM

On Mon, Jun 29, 2015 at 05:31:03PM +0100, Patrick H. Lauke wrote:
> On 29/06/2015 17:13, Patrick H. Lauke wrote:
> To bring this to a point: what is displayed in a browser window of
> size w/h at 100% zoom level is effectively identical to what is
> displayed in a window of size w*2/h*2 at 200% zoom level (since zoom
> level in desktop browsers redefines ALL sizes - both absolute and
> relative). So any problems (cut-off or overlapping content etc) that
> would happen for a zoom user at a specific size would also happen in
> exactly the same way to a non-zoom user with a browser window/device
> screen size that's set to the equivalent non-zoomed dimensions.

I haven't seen an example of broken-only-on-zoom, but an example of one
would maybe do something like (because I've been forced to do this on
non-responsive sites due to someone not planning for content):

A row of boxes, in order to maintain the same heights, has room for
a text area where some CEO wanted "4 lines of text". While the breakpoints
could be styled to decide how many boxes in a row will fit horizontally,
even if the developer used em's to set the height of the text area,
when browser zooming eventually text starts wrapping and now you've got
5 or 6 lines of text, whereas if you had only shrunk your browser width,
you probably still have 4 lines of text and nothing cut off (we're
assuming another beyond the '4 lines' is overflowed or something).

Though I also lean towards "that's so broken, no way can one claim it
only affects zoom" (and in my experience zoom wraps text 'earlier'
than magnification, which just shows a larger version of what the
browser is already displaying).

This sort of thing is so brittle, there's easily a bazillion non-
zoom places where the last line can be lost, but I'm sure there
are people out there setting heights for content areas and
other such madness (see my mention above).
So this is some specific instance I could think of where maybe
someone with merely a less-wide screen would be able to see a full
set of text and someone who zooms ends up missing the last line or two.

cheers,
_mallory