Preferment of liquid over elastic design for accessibility reasons

Name: Liam McGee
Email: liam.mcgee@communis.co.uk
Affiliation: WAI EOWG, Communis Ltd
Document: W2
Item Number: Success Criterion 1.4.7
Part of Item: 
Comment Type: technical
Summary of Issue: Preferment of liquid over elastic design for accessibility reasons
Comment (Including rationale for any proposed change):
Rationale: 



Firstly, the need for horizontal scrolling depends on the pixel-width of the viewport. This is not under the designer\'s control.



Secondly, this is in any case problematic as a long word (or a URL) in a columnar layout will easily fail this (loss of content as the layout breaks). This may be even worse in languages where long words are a common occurrence. In a layout context, it is saying \"a word may not be more than half the width of a column\".



Thirdly, horizontal scrolling is certainly a usability issue, but not an accessibility issue - horizontal scrolling does not prevent a user from accessing info (or at least, no more than vertical scrolling does). I would rather scroll horizontally then have headings and URLs become unreadable - which really is an accessibility issue. I am well used to scrolling all over the viewport when using screen mag software, for example.

Proposed Change:
Suggested change: remove \"and in a way that does not require the user to scroll horizontally\"