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Re: [EXTERNAL] how to use text spacing bookmarklet

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From: Mark Magennis
Date: Nov 20, 2020 6:21AM

Bhargav,

When you activate the Text Spacing test tool bookmarklet (http://html5accessibility.com/tests/tsbookmarklet.html) on a page, the page content should automatically take on the four changes that the user has to be able to make in order to meet SC 1.4.12:

Line height (line spacing) to at least 1.5 times the font size;
Spacing following paragraphs to at least 2 times the font size;
Letter spacing (tracking) to at least 0.12 times the font size;
Word spacing to at least 0.16 times the font size.

Sometimes the bookmarklet doesn't do this. As far as I can tell, there are two possible reasons for this:

1. The page code doesn't allow these changes to be made. In which case you have found an SC 1.4.12 violation.
2. The content is somewhere the bookmarklet can't reach. I think the bookmarklet may not be able to affect content within an iframe. That may have been changed though so I'm not sure.

If you're unsure of whether the lack of change is due to 1 or 2 above, then try editing the CSS directly. In the F12 code inspector, edit the CSS to set the following attribute values for all text:

line-height: 1.5 !important;
letter-spacing: 0.12em !important;
word-spacing: 0.16em !important;
margin-bottom: 2em !important;

This is what the bookmarklet does.

Mark