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Re: Does 1.4.10 essentially replace 1.4.4?

for

From: Mallory
Date: Sep 6, 2021 2:08AM

...there's also the cute wording between the two.

"up to 200%"
"at 400%"

With those soulless clients who are lawyer-driven to get a "WCAG audit", they can pass 200%, 400% and fail huge and hard at 300% and "pass" WCAG. Eric Eggert and Pat and maybe a few others have pointed out that if 1.4.10 was "up to" then with all the gazillion possible viewport sizes and breakpoints, it could in theory become impossible to test.

Also the 200% one I've read as saying that regardless of what size you start at by default, the user can make the text twice as big. The 400% one doesn't, it says content reflows properly. I have run into sites being quite evil, where they found art direction more important than usability, where if you used browser zoom to increase things the actual font glyphs remained the same size (they would use viewportheight/viewportwidth units for the fonts, ug). Such a site could in theory pass the 400% (if it reflows properly) but fail 200% (I cannot make the text twice as big).

When auditing, if I'm not pressed for time, I'll check 200% in Firefox using its text-only zoom and test 400% in a blink with the browser sized to 1280 width, and then for sh*ts check portrait on my Android potato. Most fails I run into are due to devs making phone-portrait reflow nicely but due to stickies makes 400% impossible on a laptop since laptops are basically landscape orientation.
(No, I can't fail a site for breaking with text-only zoom but I have discovered it's so closely related to possible problems when checking the Text Spacing SC that it's good to just see what you get with it; I check Text Spacing coupled with increased zoom as well. They *should* work well together.)

cheers,
_mallory

On Sun, Sep 5, 2021, at 10:38 PM, Steve Green wrote:
> 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
>
>
>