Your comments on WCAG 2.0 Public Working Draft of May, 2007

Dear Liam McGee,

Thank you for your comments on the 17 May 2007 Public Working Draft of
the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 (WCAG 2.0
http://www.w3.org/TR/2007/WD-WCAG20-20070517/). The WCAG Working Group
has reviewed all comments received on the May draft, and will be
publishing an updated Public Working Draft shortly. Before we do that,
we would like to know whether we have understood your comments
correctly, and also whether you are satisfied with our resolutions.

Please review our resolutions for the following comments, and reply to
us by 19 November 2007 at public-comments-wcag20@w3.org to say whether
you are satisfied. Note that this list is publicly archived. Note also
that we are not asking for new issues, nor for an updated review of
the entire document at this time.

Please see below for the text of comments that you submitted and our
resolutions to your comments. Each comment includes a link to the
archived copy of your original comment on
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-comments-wcag20/, and may
also include links to the relevant changes in the WCAG 2.0 Editor's
Draft of May-October 2007 at
http://www.w3.org/WAI/GL/WCAG20/WD-WCAG20-20071102/

Thank you for your time reviewing and sending comments. Though we
cannot always do exactly what each commenter requests, all of the
comments are valuable to the development of WCAG 2.0.

Regards,

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

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Comment 1: Preferment of liquid over elastic design for accessibility reasons
Source: http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-comments-wcag20/2007Jul/0231.html
(Issue ID: 2356)
----------------------------
Original Comment:
----------------------------

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"

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

We have addressed this problem in a different way. We have removed SC
1.4.7 (Reflow). All the techniques from the success criterion are also
sufficient techniques for SC 1.4.4 (Resize text) and are listed there.
The other aspects of SC 1.4.7 are covered by a new success criterion
that addresses readability of text:

"For the visual presentation of blocks of text, a mechanism is
available to achieve the following: (Level AAA)

        * foreground and background colors can be selected by the user
        * width is no more than 80 characters
        * text is not aligned on both the left and the right [LC-1253]
[LC-569 (add)]
        * line spacing is at least space-and-a-half within paragraphs,
and paragraph spacing is larger than line spacing [LC- 569]
        * text is resized without assistive technology up to 200
percent in a way that does not require the user to scroll horizontally
to read a line of text "

Received on Sunday, 4 November 2007 04:57:01 UTC