Steve's concerns on Orientation

I spoke to Steve about his concerns and followed the discussion on issue 509. In short, I think that he has a good point and that we can adjust this language to address the concerns, hopefully without too much difficulty.

Current CFC language:

  *   A mechanism is available to view and operate content in portrait and landscape orientation, except where a specific display orientation is essential.

The issue that Steve is raising is that this creates testing problems for content developed for or even just tested with devices that don’t do this orientation changing. We tried to cover this with “essential” by indicating that “Document that "essential" includes limitations of hardware, implementation (e.g. kiosk, seatback displays)” but we shouldn’t have done that because that changes essential from having to do with the content and putting it on the devices/UA.

Steve’s suggestion is as follows:

  *   Content does not restrict its view and operation to only portrait or landscape orientation, unless a specific display orientation is essential.

This would still make a tester working on airline seatback content think for a minute about how this would be tested, but we can document that it doesn’t matter in those situations, just like it doesn’t matter if you are delivering for a device that doesn’t support orientation changes at all – build the content correctly and it will work in places where it can work.

I’ve reserved 20 minutes on the call to talk about this SC again, so we can either decide to restart the CFC or carry on with the existing one.

Thanks,
AWK

Andrew Kirkpatrick
Group Product Manager, Accessibility
Adobe

akirkpat@adobe.com
http://twitter.com/awkawk