[i18n-activity] Adapting Text: Letter spacing

r12a has just created a new issue for https://github.com/w3c/i18n-activity:

== Adapting Text: Letter spacing ==
Success Criterion 1.4.13 Adapting Text§ 
https://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG21/#adapting-text

> If the technologies being used allow the user agent to adapt style properties of text, then no loss of essential content or functionality occurs by adapting all of the following:
> Letter spacing (tracking) to at least 0.12 times the font size;

Is the content author going to allow the user to apply a fixed tracking distance for all text?  I imagine this would be better applied as a multiplier or addition for current tracking.

One reason for this is that i am told that tracking is used in German as a method of emphasis (eg. rather than english italicisation). If you make the tracking for a spaced-out word the same as the surrounding text, the reader would loose a presentational feature that is meaning-related.

I also have questions about how this woud apply to other scripts.  

Arabic, Assyrian, Mongolian, and N'Ko, for example, are cursive scripts (ie. the letters join).  Again, for Arabic, baseline stretching is often used for emphasising text, for making headings or signage more visible, or for matching the length of adjoining lines of text, etc. When the baseline is stretched, moreover, there are fairly complicated rules about where the stretching is and isn't allowed. I don't believe this is yet covered by the letter-spacing property in CSS.

In other complex scripts, such as Devanagari (used for Hindi), certain combinations of characters combine together, and it's not clear to me how tracking is applied but it's clear that it's not between each character.  If the user is applying the tracking via a CSS property change, that may take care of many of the issues, but not clear to me yet whether all.


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Please view or discuss this issue at https://github.com/w3c/i18n-activity/issues/478 using your GitHub account

Received on Wednesday, 13 September 2017 15:05:48 UTC