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Re: SC 1.4.4: Failures and Sufficient Techniques

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From: Steve Green
Date: Apr 8, 2019 9:19AM

For this particular success criterion, we test the appearance and behaviour in Internet Explorer 11, Firefox and Chrome at all zoom levels up to 200%. It is quite common for issues to occur in one browser and not the others, so you definitely cannot rely on testing only with one browser. And it's not always Internet Explorer that breaks - I have seen plenty of websites where Chrome and/or Firefox break but Internet Explorer doesn't (or it breaks in a different way).

It is not sufficient to only test at 100% and 200% zoom because we often see issues that occur only at intermediate zoom levels.

So far I have not seen anything to suggest it is worth testing this success criterion on mobile devices, although we do verify that pinch-to-zoom has not been turned off. However, I am certainly willing to review that decision if there is any evidence it's worth doing. Pinch to zoom does what you would expect - it makes everything larger - but that is not the case with zooming on desktop browsers. I am guessing that is because pinch-to-zoom works directly with the video card, whereas browser zoom is presumably done via the browser's rendering engine.

Steve Green
Managing Director
Test Partners Ltd