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Does 1.4.10 essentially replace 1.4.4?

for

From: glen walker
Date: Sep 4, 2021 8:26AM


1.4.4 requires zooming to 200% "without loss of content or functionality".
1.4.10 requires zooming to 400% "without loss of information or
functionality"

I'm not sure why the wording is different between "loss of *content*" vs
"loss of *information*". I suppose the latter could lose DOM elements
(which I consider content) but the general gist of information is still
there so it might pass. But that's a side topic. For all intents and
purposes, they're both talking about not losing stuff when zoomed.

1.4.4 doesn't care what size your browser window is so in theory you could
zoom to 200% and lose content if your browser is small but if you maximize
the browser and you have a large monitor, you might not lose any content so
it could pass.

1.4.10 says to test with a 1280 width browser (for vertical content).

So when testing, do you really need to test for 1.4.4 if you're trying to
pass WCAG 2.1 AA conformance? Can't you just test for 1.4.10 and if that
passes, you also pass 1.4.4?

I suppose, in theory again, you might have different CSS breakpoints and
the breakpoint for 400% zoom might look good but the breakpoint for 200%
might not. I've never had that happen but it is possible so testing at
both 200% and 400% is probably wise.

I'm just tossing a discussion topic out there. If you're in a hurry to do
a quick scan, you might be able to test for 400% and check off both success
criteria. Of course, when pressing Ctrl++, you have to go through 200%
before 400% (unless you've modified your browser zoom to jump right to
400%) so it's only a few seconds extra to pause at 200%, scroll the page to
see if it looks good, then continue up to 400%.

I've also glossed over the scrollbar requirement for 1.4.10.

What I typically do is zoom to 200%, see if it looks good at my current
browser size, then continue up to 400% and resize my browser to 1280 (using
responsive view from the code inspector [both firefox and chrome], which
makes it easy to set the browser width) and see if it looks good and no
horizontal scrollbar appears.