Text resizing

Name: Sandra Vassallo
Email: S.Vassallo@e-bility.com
Affiliation: e-Bility Inclusive IT
Document: W2
Item Number: Success Criterion 1.4.4
Part of Item: 
Comment Type: general comment
Summary of Issue: Text resizing
Comment (Including rationale for any proposed change):
The ability to resize text can be critical to accessibility for people with print disabilities such as degenerative eye sight and reading/learning difficulty but this does not seem to be adequately covered in the Guidelines.

1. SC 1.4.4 Resize Text is a Level AA requirement (rather than Level A)

2. Text as an image appears to be acceptable, yet images are not resizable by many browsers and where image ‘zoom’ is a feature of the browser this can create other accessibility problems such as broken page formats, horizontal scroll bars and pixelation of the text/image. Turning images off to view the alt text is not a practical solution, since many people do not know how to do this and once set this preference applies to all images not just text images. It becomes increasingly difficult when text based images are used for navigation elements, such as an image map.

3. Resizing of text based form content and form controls also does not seem to be mentioned and textual content in non-text based form controls also needs to be resizable by the user. For example: using the browser resizing options in forms is problematic when the text resizes but not the radio button.

Proposed Change:
1. Move SC 1.4.4 to Level A

2. Text as an image should not be acceptable unless Success Criterion are applied that would address the needs of people with print disability

3. Include Success Criterion for resizing of text based and non-text based form controls

Received on Friday, 29 June 2007 06:13:13 UTC