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Making mobile view available to all as way of constraining a11y testing costs

for

From: Robert Fentress
Date: Jan 4, 2018 9:06AM

Hello, all.

I've been thinking about how time consuming it is to fully test the
accessibility of every breakpoint on every page and am looking for ways to
economize. I wonder if it might be an acceptable alternative, given
resource constraints, to just fully test the largest desktop breakpoint and
the smallest mobile breakpoint. If this strategy were adopted, then an
option would be provided to users to automatically apply the styles
associated with the small breakpoint in any context, maybe by clicking on
an icon of a finger touching a mobile screen. This affordance would likely
be useful to any number of users who might prefer that presentation, such
as those using touch on a regular-sized laptop with a large viewport, and
it would ensure that at least one fully-tested view was always available to
users. This would, of course, assume that developers and content authors
received appropriate training on developing accessibly, so that, hopefully,
the other breakpoints would still be accessible. This strategy is just a
way of dealing with the reality that, in an auditing context, there are
limited resources available for testing, and a seemingly growing number of
breakpoints as the largest possible viewport size increases. What do you
think?

Best,
Rob

--
Rob Fentress
Senior Accessibility Solutions Designer
Assistive Technologies at Virginia Tech
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