Re: Your comments on WCAG 2.0 Last Call Draft of April 2006

Hi Loretta,
thank you for your answer.

1) My commment: http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-comments-wcag20/2006Jun/0120.html  

2) The Response from Working Group:

Although text resizing is primarily a user agent function, we have
added new success criteria to address the author's responsibility for
supporting text resizing:

Level AA: Visually rendered text can be resized without assistive
technology up to 200 percent and down to 50 percent without loss of
content or functionality.

Level AAA: Visually rendered text can be resized without assistive
technology up to 200 percent and down to 50 percent without loss of
content or functionality and in a way that does not require the user
to scroll horizontally.

3) My reply:

I'm quite satisfied by WG response, but, once again, I seriously invite you to consider a fact:

As I've told in other places (http://xhtml.com/en/css/css-and-accessibility/) all Web browsers have a default font size for rendering text when no CSS is specified. This font size corresponds to a font-size value of 100%, 1em or medium keyword. You can adjust the default font size for the Web page via CSS like this:

body { font-size: 0.7em; }

Web browsers will treat this value as the "Normal" or "Medium" font size for the given Web page. If the font size length units are scalable, then Web browsers can let users increase / decrease font size relative to the default font size for the given Web page.

But it is important to note that Web browsers have different abilities to let users increase the font size. For example, Firefox  lets users increase font size by multiple increments but IE has only two increments for enlarging text size (only in the recently released IE 7 there is also a page zoom tool). 

Since IE only has two increments for increasing font size ("Larger" and "Largest"), the maximum text size IE can display may not be large enough for some users if the default font is set too low!. Likewise a value of 200 percent may, or may not, be large enough depending on the default font size set by the designer.

Furthermore, a value of 200 percent may not be large enough for some users depending on the differences in the visual rendering of different fonts!.

It is hard to find a good solution that is also linked to the real world of browsers. However, I think that to impose explicit values (like 200 percent and so on) may be dangerous. How about a more generic solution?

Best Regards,

-- 
Marco Bertoni
International Webmasters Association / The HTML Writers Guild
http://www.iwanet.org

Received on Saturday, 26 May 2007 13:52:26 UTC