Allowing for Responsive Design methods

Name: Alastair Campbell
Email: alastc@gmail.com
Affiliation: Nomensa
Document: UW
Item Number: Understanding Success Criterion 1.4.4
Part of Item: Sufficient Techniques
Comment Type: general comment
Summary of Issue: Allowing for Responsive Design methods
Comment (Including rationale for any proposed change):
Since WCAG 2 was published there have been two major shifts that affect re-sizing things in (desktop) browsers:

1. All desktop browsers now default to zoom, where zooming expands everything on the page. A browser at 1024px wide would report a width of 512px at 200%. 

2. Responsive design (where sites re-size based on the reported width of the browser) is becoming popular.

These two methods combined actually work very well for zooming.

I think we should update the understanding page and sufficient techniques to allow for (perhaps even encourage) responsive design techniques. 

More explanation and discussion here:
http://alastairc.ac/2013/08/browser-zoom-great-for-accessibility/ 

Proposed Change:
Overall, I think there should now be two sufficient tests/methods to pass:

1. Zoom to 200% with no horizontal scrolling or loss of content / functionality.
2. Text-sizing to 200% without loosing content / functionality.

Specific points on the text:
- Encourage the use of techniques that work with user-agents, rather than suggesting developers build in text-resizing widgets (paragraph 2).

- Remove references to old/defunct browsers such as IE6 (and Firefox also defaults to zoom now) in paragraph 3.

- In the 'working group feels' paragraph, state that using media queries should be used to manage the layout of pages at higher zoom levels.

In the third example of success criterion:
- "A user uses a zoom function in his user agent to change the scale of the content. All the content scales uniformly, and the media queries used on the site prevent horizontal scrolling."

It would also be good to add a sufficient technique for responsive design.

NB: I am happy to draft a new version of the page and add a technique, I just saw the deadline for the call for comments and wanted to get this in quickly.

Received on Tuesday, 13 August 2013 13:46:08 UTC