Your comments on WCAG 2.0 Last Call Working Draft of December, 2007

Dear Liam McGee,

Thank you for your comments on the 11 Dec 2007 Last Call Working Draft
of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 (WCAG 2.0
http://www.w3.org/TR/2007/WD-WCAG20-20071211). The WCAG Working Group
has reviewed all comments received on the December draft. Before we
proceed to implementation, we would like to know whether we have
understood your comments correctly and whether you are satisfied with
our resolutions.

Please review our resolutions for the following comments, and reply to
us by 31 March 2008 at public-comments-wcag20@w3.org to say whether
you accept them or to discuss additional concerns you have with our
response. Note that this list is publicly archived.

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 10 March 2008 at
http://www.w3.org/WAI/GL/WCAG20/WD-WCAG20-20080310/.

Note that if you still strongly disagree with our resolution on an issue,
you have the opportunity to file a formal objection (according to
3.3.2 of the W3C Process, at
http://www.w3.org/2005/10/Process-20051014/policies.html#WGArchiveMinorityViews)
to public-comments-wcag20@w3.org. Formal objections will be reviewed
during the candidate recommendation transition meeting with the W3C
Director, unless we can come to agreement with you on a resolution in
advance of the meeting.

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: Screen width issue with reflow
Source: http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-comments-wcag20/2007Dec/0052.html
(Issue ID: 2377)
Status: VERIFIED / NOT ACCEPTED
----------------------------
Original Comment:
----------------------------

(From responses to Issue 2356)
Problem 1:
----------
Horizontal scrolling is not an accessibility issue (or, at least, I have
no evidence that this is the case from experience with users with
disabilities) - horizontal scrolling does not prevent a user from
accessing information any more than vertical scrolling does. I am well
used to scrolling all over the viewport when using screen magnification
software, for example. This *is* a usability issue, but it does not
prevent access to information.

More critically, the need for horizontal scrolling depends on the
pixel-width of the viewport, and this is *impossible for the designer to
control*. A moderately long word (or a URL) on a PDA will easily fail
this - and some languages have a lot of long words.

Proposed Change:
----------------
Suggested change: replace "in a way that does not require the user
to scroll horizontally" with "while remaining readable to the user"

Current comment:

Is there any update about the screen width issue?

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

We have clarified the last bullet of the success criterion by adding
"on a full screen window".

So any URI would have to be longer than 1/2 of the screen in order to
cause a problem with this provision.

Note that the last bullet does not prohibit the use (or need to use) a
horizontal scroll bar. It just prohibits requiring its use to read a
single line of text in  a paragraph from the beginning to the end. We
have added information to Understanding 1.4.8 to help clarify this.

Any page with two columns of text on it would automatically conform
even if it did not reflow.  You could zoom the page and read either
column using only the vertical scrollbar once you had the column on
screen.

Screen magnifiers such as Zoomtext are designed specifically to make
horizontal scrolling (or any kind of scolling) extremely easy, by
simply moving the mouse. Users who do not have the benefit of
assistive technology do not have this same advantage. At level AAA our
success critieria do not have the same requirement of AT on the part
of the user that we find at Level A and AA. People with cognitive
challenges do not require a screen magnifier to read, but they are
most certainly disoriented by having to scroll horizontally. This is
also true of low vision people who do not use AT.

Received on Tuesday, 11 March 2008 00:19:57 UTC