Re: let's bump to 10mm from 9mm

On 17/12/2015 22:32, Patrick H. Lauke wrote:
> It's not outside of developer *thinking*, but simply outside of
> developer *control*. There is no way for a dev to guarantee a certain
> physical rendering size. All it would take is a device to come around
> with some crazy mapping

In fact, we don't even need to look very far. If we're taking these 
guidelines to also apply to touchscreen laptops, there's now a huge 
range of Windows 10 touch-enabled laptops out there, in a variety of 
physical screen sizes and default resolutions. Additionally, users can 
even set their overall resolution to something non-standard on these 
devices (leaving aside the fact that if they set their resolution too 
high, they shouldn't really complain if things get too small to touch on 
the touchscreen).

 >  (and I now remember the uproar that went around
> the responsive web design community when the iPad Mini with its "smaller
> screen/same resolution in CSS pixels" came out) for any previously safe
> and conformant content to be immediately non-conformant when tested on
> that device.Sure, devs will likely find some hacky loophole to try and
> make their sites/content work ok even in those scenarios, but it's
> basically a fundamentally shaky foundation to build a hard pass/fail
> requirement on.

In essence, if they find out that a device (like the iPad Mini) renders 
their content and controls too small, they may think "ah, I should 
really see if I can somehow tweak this to make it a bit more usable on 
this device"...but if there was a hard requirement in an SC it'd be "ah, 
I must somehow find a way to make it bigger for this device, otherwise 
my previous PASS will be a FAIL under the 'mobile' extension for WCAG".

This makes me wonder slightly if it's even possible to enshrine what is 
effectively a usability issue as a hard accessibility SC...unless it's 
kept VERY vague and/or provides mitigiating circumstances (which would 
then weaken it considerably as a hard SC).

P
-- 
Patrick H. Lauke

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Received on Thursday, 17 December 2015 22:45:10 UTC