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Re: text only zoom

for

From: Olaf Drümmer
Date: Jun 17, 2016 9:05AM

I'd definitely urge everybody to put the focus on responsive design. Just scaling the text may cause all kinds of hard to avoid issues (and wouldn't a vision impaired user want to see icons and other such stuff enlarged at the same time?). Good responsive design ensure that when using zoom, all aspects are zoomed reasonably well in relationship to each other and in relation to the view port, and of course, horizontal scaling should never become necessary.

In retrospect, text only zooming appears more like a workaround from times, when only few people would understand what responsive design is.

Olaf


> On 17.06.2016, at 16:45, Joseph Sherman < <EMAIL REMOVED> > wrote:
>
> Following up on this: Given that FireFox is the only browser that allows for Text-only zoom; that responsive design eliminates horizontal scrolling; and almost none of the sites I visited worked perfectly with 200% text-only zoom- Should text-only zoom still be a (high) concern?
>
>
> Joseph
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: WebAIM-Forum [mailto: <EMAIL REMOVED> ] On Behalf Of Guy Hickling
> Sent: Thursday, June 16, 2016 7:50 PM
> To: <EMAIL REMOVED>
> Subject: Re: [WebAIM] complex form questions
>
> Joseph,
>
> For your second question, normally, setting both height and width of a text container in px units is a definite no-no for accessibility.
> Text-only zoom, in any browser that allows it, for instance Firefox, is a very useful tool for people with poor sight because they can increase the text size but still keep the whole page within the window without having to scroll horizontally to read long lines of text, or other content. (IE11 no longer allows text-only zoom, IE10 did.) The WCAG specifies allowing upto 200% without corrupting content, but some users will go as high as their browser will allow.
>
> Unfortunately what happens is that, as the user increases the text size, the container can only remain the same size if it's dimensions are in pixels. This means text overflows outside it's container, overwriting whatever's to the right or below it. This is seen regularly on all too many sites, where one lot of text overwriting another lot makes both texts unreadable. (The problem also occurs with responsive media queries if the media breakpoints are in px units.)
>
> You can set one dimension, usually the width, in px units, but the other should not be restricted so the box can expand along with the text, and other items on the screen must also be able to move down to make way for the expansion, so they mustn't be positioned with px units either.
>
> If you can zoom to 200% on a particular screen and get away with it without overwriting anything, perhaps because there is enough empty space in your containers for the text to expand into, you're lucky, but this isn't normally the case.
>
> Regards,
> Guy Hickling
> > > > > > >