Re: Inline links with large-enough activation (touch) target (rough idea)

On 14/11/2016 11:37, Alastair Campbell wrote:
> Patrick wrote:
>> the technique demonstrates how inline links can be made to have a
>> large activation target despite being inline.
>
> I would have thought a user-agent could provide more intelligent
> over-lapping logic? For example, where two inline links have
> overlapping hit areas cut it down the middle instead of using the
> full hit area of the second link. The hit areas would still be
> large(r) but behave more as you’d expect.

Certainly a user agent could, and some do in certain circumstances (I 
seem to recall Chrome/Android having heuristics that bring up a 
zoomed-in version of the page when you try to hit links that are bunched 
up close together). However, not all user agents do that (yet). Perhaps 
this should be written up in the understanding part of the SC (a la 
"Some user agents may provide a mechanism...")

>
>> If content has many inline links that can and will bunch up too
>> close, then it's a fail of the proposed SC and the site will need
>> to do something else in order to pass the SC. A lot of other
>> current and proposed SCs are "hard" to scale to CMS driven
>> sites...
>
> No, but it makes it difficult to test or predict, as the author (or a
> naïve tester) may not see the problem because it isn’t apparent in
> their size of browser. It is the kind of thing that may not come up
> with a site is created, but then gets added in standard content
> later.

Then again, this would need to be added to the understanding part of the 
SC, I'd say.

> I’m not saying the SC is wrong, but there are a lot of sites with
> links in paragraphs that will fail by using standard HTML that has
> been considered accessible since WCAG 1. Wikipedia comes to mind [1].
> The proof of concept doesn’t solve the “Wikipedia style” problem, and
> I’m not sure that it is solvable without user-agent changes.

A lot of sites that up until now were doing what was ok under WCAG 1 / 2 
will now fail a new SC that addresses a problem not previously covered 
by WCAG. Seems unavoidable, I think?

Note that there are further techniques that can be added to the one 
quickfire "give inline links a larger activation target" I drafted here. 
Increasing line height would help mitigate some of the overlap issues, 
for instance. Other techniques would be editorial in nature perhaps 
(e.g. avoid having a high inline link density). These additional 
techniques can potentially be documented/explained in the 
understanding/techniques part of the SC.

My main aim here was to at least tackle the position that was voiced a 
few times on this list/in meetings that the problem would be impossible 
at all to tackle for inline links.

P
-- 
Patrick H. Lauke

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Received on Monday, 14 November 2016 11:03:44 UTC