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

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From: Jonathan Avila
Date: Jan 4, 2018 4:05PM

> 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?

Because I use low resolution on desktop or some browser zoom I find myself almost always entering mobile breakpoints on my desktop . In my experience page zoom not only changes the viewport with but also the scale factor. So the text size of sites is different at a width of 533 then it would be by zooming to say 150% that gets me to 533 (number made up) but also has a scale factor of 1.5. Thus there is a larger opportunity for non-fluid responsive sites to have issues such as text that is cutoff or overflows over other text or text over a different background without sufficient contrast. A truly fluid site would not have these issues but in my experience most sites really aren't truly fluid but instead are a series of breakpoints.

Jonathan

Jonathan Avila
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Level Access, inc. (formerly SSB BART Group, inc.)
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-----Original Message-----
From: WebAIM-Forum [mailto: <EMAIL REMOVED> ] On Behalf Of Robert Fentress
Sent: Thursday, January 4, 2018 11:06 AM
To: WebAIM Discussion List < <EMAIL REMOVED> >
Subject: [WebAIM] Making mobile view available to all as way of constraining a11y testing costs

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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