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Re: fontsize vs. window width and line length

for

From: Jonathan Avila
Date: Sep 24, 2017 6:19PM

> . Are any numbers recommended?

This was discussed in the low vision task force at the W3c. Some people had suggested 25 characters per line for people with low vision. In the end the proposed success criteria in the current working draft calls for support of 400% zoom at 1280 which comes down to support zoom without loss of content or functionality at 320 CSS pixels (with exceptions). This is of course still a proposed working draft and changes can occur.

https://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG21/

Jonathan

Jonathan Avila
Chief Accessibility Officer
Level Access, inc. (formerly SSB BART Group, inc.)
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-----Original Message-----
From: WebAIM-Forum [mailto: <EMAIL REMOVED> ] On Behalf Of Nick Levinson via WebAIM-Forum
Sent: Saturday, September 23, 2017 9:58 PM
To: <EMAIL REMOVED>
Subject: [WebAIM] fontsize vs. window width and line length

A minimum fontsize is usually agreed on for accessibility. However, when the viewport gets so narrow that many words get hyphenated and often hyphenated in several places, in extreme cases where a viewport is only wide enough for a few letters, which makes text hard to read, when is a smaller font size acceptable as a trade-off to maintain accessibility? I design down to a viewport width of 50px since that's the narrowest the Firefox browser supported (I'm not sure newer versions do), although I don't happen to know of any physical device that narrow (some smartwatches might allow 320px wide). I see advice for an ideal body line length of 66 characters (including punctuation and spaces) or half that for small devices (<https://blog.prototypr.io/how-to-set-perfect-line-lengths-for-the-web-528f08f8b344#.tzzk9wrgf>, as accessed 2-18-17), but ideal is useless for narrow viewports, yet a tiny fontsize is also useless anywhere. Are any numbers recommended?
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Nick