Re: Warning: The Understanding Reflow gonly 200% text.

Hi Wayne,

This isn’t new, as I said we’ve been through this a couple of times:
https://github.com/w3c/wcag/issues/391#issuecomment-401412278


You have previously commented that sites generally don’t reduce the text-size at higher zoom levels because it would be hard for everyone trying to read it on a small screen – which is true.


> Did we mean that authors could make text small as the page was zoomed?  The following language in Understand Reflow implies this.

Not “small”, but not necessarily 400%.

Enforcing a flat percentage increase for text of varying sizes is not helpful. Large text increased to 400% will create a lot more scrolling, and we would be incentivising designers to use smaller headings & text to start with.

(Seeing that your style sheets make headings the same size as regular text helped my understanding here.)

We had good information from the LVTF, and I think Jon will agree the SC wasn’t adjusted because we didn’t believe him or didn’t understand the requirement.

It was adjusted because there has to be a reasonable balance between the user-requirement and the demand on authors. Plus the un-intended consequence of increasing large text to 400%.

We currently have two related requirements:

1.          Text size must be able to reach 200% of the default.

2.          Reflow must work down to 320px.

When you put those together, the easiest thing is to allow text to increase x4. That’s the default. You have to put work in to reduce text size as smaller screen sizes.

We’ve done dozens of 2.1 audits since last summer, and I don’t think we’ve had an instance where a site failed 1.4.4 whilst passing 1.4.10. In the vast majority of cases text would be 400%, except where it started very large.

To plug what *might* be a gap I think a min-text-size approach would be best, but we’d need evidence to show there is an issue given the current requirements.

I.e. Are there sites which currently pass 1.4.4 + 1.4.10 and reduce the text size at higher zoom levels to the 200-300% level?

In the code the site would have to set text at 16px and then reduce it to 9-12px at larger zoom levels.

Cheers,

-Alastair