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Re: Does 1.4.10 essentially replace 1.4.4?

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From: Steve Green
Date: Sep 5, 2021 2:38PM

I have seen plenty of websites where the media queries are messed up such that 1.4.10 passes, but 1.4.4 doesn't. The desktop and mobile layouts (corresponding to 100% and 400% zoom) have generally been done properly, but the intermediate breakpoints for tablets are often buggy.

It's also worth noting that zooming is only one of the ways that a website can pass 1.4.4. It is possible (albeit unlikely) that a website relies on a text resizing widget to meet 1.4.4 because zooming doesn't work properly at 200% for some reason.

These sort of issues are less likely to happen with new websites, but are perhaps more likely with older fixed-width websites that have had some media queries added to make them responsive. We recently worked on a 15 year-old web application created in XHTML 1.0 where the client was trying to do this.

Steve Green
Managing Director
Test Partners Ltd


-----Original Message-----
From: WebAIM-Forum < <EMAIL REMOVED> > On Behalf Of Patrick H. Lauke
Sent: 05 September 2021 18:31
To: <EMAIL REMOVED>
Subject: Re: [WebAIM] Does 1.4.10 essentially replace 1.4.4?

On 05/09/2021 18:22, glen walker wrote:
> Thanks Birkir and Patrick. I understand the fundamentals of both
> success criteria. My question was more academic in nature. If you
> want to conform to WCAG 2.1 AA then you must pass 1.4.10. If you pass
> 1.4.10, doesn't that
> (mostly) imply you also pass 1.4.4 so there's no need to test for 1.4.4?

They're independent, but yes if you start off testing 1.4.10 and it's fine, it's likely that 1.4.4 passes as well (barring oddity of intermediate viewport sizes if the developers have only set specific ones and zooming to 200% would fall between the gaps and leave you in unforeseen broken dimensions.

> That's another aspect that isn't completely clear (to me). 1.4.10
> doesn't really say that *both* the width and height must be set. It
> just says that vertical scrolling content (such as English, German,
> Spanish, etc) doesn't require scrolling in two dimensions when at
> (exactly) 320 CSS px width. It doesn't say I must set the height too.
>
> Same with horizontal scrolling content (such as Mandarin, Korean, Arabic).
> The requirement refers to setting the height to 256 CSS px but doesn't
> say I must set the width too.
>
> Conceptually, if you think of the vertical scrolling case, if you
> don't have a horizontal scrollbar then you're good for 1.4.10 and
> since you're scrolling vertically, it doesn't really matter what the
> height of the browser is.

As the idea behind 1.4.10 was a desktop user on a 1280x768 display zooming to 400%, it makes sense to test at that exact dimension. And regardless of language, there might be situations (e.g. with fixed
headers/footer/etc) where there's no bi-directional scrollbars, but where content is completely covered by other fixed/absolutely positioned content. Or situations like a modal dialog that is centered and gets cut off at the top and bottom, with no way for the user to scroll that modal properly into view. Those are more general "without loss of information or functionality" failures. (But yes this aspect is still quite vague in
1.4.10 and the understanding doc, and I'm sure some will argue that those aren't failures of 1.4.10 at all)

P
--
Patrick H. Lauke

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