Re: Your comments on WCAG 2.0 Public Working Draft of May, 2007

Wayne Dick wrote:
> Liam,
> 
> However, I disagree.  I think forcing people to employ horizontal 
> scrolling is unequal access in the sense that the quality of the data is 
> not preserved.  So, I claim horizontal scrolling is an accessibility 
> issue, because accessibility is not minimal perceivably.   It requires 
> equally effective perception, operation, understandability and robustness.
> 
> I cannot read advanced mathematics with horizontal scrolling.
> 
> Wayne

Hi Wayne -- interesting. Why is it different to requiring vertical 
scrolling? But I am happy for that part of the argument to be overturned.

My argument was a two-parter though. The 'strong argument' objection to 
the requirement is that it's *not possible to achieve* -- because there 
is no pixel-width that is given to aim at. A layout that resizes 
perfectly on a 800x600 screen is likely to break immediately on a PDA, 
for example, and there's nothing I can to about it. I think that this 
requirement not testable... unless they specify a pixel width; and it's 
too technology-dependent - advanced PDAs such as the iPhone have 
horizontal scrolling as an integral part of the interface.

Do you (or anyone else on eowg) have a suggestion on how we can rephrase 
the rquirement so that it is meetable but still preserves the gist of 
'increase to 200% without making it unreadable'?

>> More critically, the need for horizontal scrolling depends on the 
>> pixel-width of the viewport, and this is *impossible for the designer 
>> to control*. A moderately long word (or a URL) on a PDA will easily 
>> fail this - and some languages have a lot of long words.

Received on Wednesday, 7 November 2007 09:54:58 UTC