Deep concern - WCAG 2.0 liquid layout - Re: EOWG: Agenda for 20 July 2007 Teleconference

Just browsing through WCAG2.0 and came across this:

1.4.7 Resize and Wrap: Visually rendered text can be resized without 
assistive technology up to 200 percent and down to 50 percent without 
loss of content or functionality ***and in a way that does not require 
the user to scroll horizontally***. (Level AAA)

(My asterisks added for emphasis).

Hmmm. Some serious problems with this.

1) Given that there is no support for soft hyphens aas far as I am 
aware, this is problematic as a long word in a columnar layout could 
easily fail this. This may be even worse in languages where long words 
are a common occurrence. In a layout context, it is saying "a word may 
not be more than half the width of a column"

2) The need for horizontal scrolling depends on the pixel-width of the 
viewport. This is not under the designer's control.

3) This checkpoint champions liquid design over elastic design as more 
accessible. Firstly I disagree (liquid designs break), secondly I think 
this is something a lot of experienced developers would disagree with.

Can we discuss this as an Any Other Business?

Received on Thursday, 19 July 2007 13:26:22 UTC