Your comments on WCAG 2.0 Last Call Draft of April 2006

Dear Alastair Campbell ,

Thank you for your comments on the 2006 Last Call Working Draft of the
Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 (WCAG 2.0
http://www.w3.org/TR/2006/WD-WCAG20-20060427/). We appreciate the
interest that you have taken in these guidelines.

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us to revise wording covered by an earlier issue. We therefore waited
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Public Working Draft at http://www.w3.org/TR/2007/WD-WCAG20-20070517/.

PLEASE REVIEW the decisions  for the following comments and reply to
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Public Working Draft by 29 June 2007. We have revised the guidelines
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Thank you,

Loretta Guarino Reid, WCAG WG Co-Chair
Gregg Vanderheiden, WCAG WG Co-Chair
Michael Cooper, WCAG WG Staff Contact

On behalf of the WCAG Working Group

----------------------------------------------------------
Comment 1:

Source: http://www.w3.org/mid/44BEB85A.80707@alastairc.ac
(Issue ID: LC-1437)

W2
1.5 (missing)
Intent,
Description,
Examples

I cannot find anything on relative sizing of fonts or layout, at all.
(Also noted in other comments.) I believe these are important aspects
for accessible computers in general as well as the Internet, for
anyone with a mild to moderate visual impairment.

    * The most common user agent Internet Explorer (installed on many
corporate networks) does not allow the resizing of pixel sized fonts.
Nor does the version 7(b3) update. (It does include 'zoom', but this
causes horizontal scrolling on any currently accessible site).
    * Proper 'zooming' is not generally available yet (although some
are working on it.)
    * Fixed width/height layouts suffer from a similar problem, partly
because they often do not react well to increases in font size. There
are some basic layout guidelines for HTML/CSS websites.
    * It is applicable to all screen technologies. For example, Flash
scales well, but is often trapped in a fixed size window. Acrobat has
re-flow & scaling. Other new technologies should be required to scale
well.

Relative fonts or layout may be covered in the techniques (although
not when I last searched), but I believe it should be part of the
normative document (level 2 success criteria).
	
Proposed Change:

Include a revised version of WCAG 1.0's checkpoint 3.4, example
included below. The font aspects could be added to 1.3, but it does
not seem a natural fit.

Guideline 1.5 Use scalable fonts and layout
Level 1 Success Criteria for Guideline 1.5

(No level 1 success criteria for this guideline.)
Level 2 Success Criteria for Guideline 1.5

1.5.1 text sizing should be specified in a unit that is user
re-sizable. The interface should be perceivable and operable with text
increased to a 200% size.

1.5.2 the layout of the page should allow for a variety of screen
resolutions and sizes by using relative units for the primary layout
areas, such as overall layout, and content area.

-------------------------------
Somewhat short, rough and ready, but I can expand on this if the
concept is agreeable. This article on basic layout guidelines
(http://alastairc.ac/2006/05/accessible-layouts/) could provide
inspiration for the CSS techniques.

----------------------------
Response from Working Group:
----------------------------

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

SC 1.4.4 (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.

SC 1.4.7 (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.

Received on Thursday, 17 May 2007 23:26:14 UTC