RE: Horizontal scrolling & reflow

I see these horizontal scrollers a lot such as Google search on the iPhone.
My thoughts are

  1.  That you don’t have to scroll to read any visible block of content – that is each discrete unit fits on the screen at any given time.  It’s the larger control that does not.  So they don’t present the same issue with a paragraph of text.
  2.  They could fall under the essential exception just like toolbars do.

“Interfaces which provide toolbars to edit content need to show both the content and the toolbar in the viewport. Depending on the number of toolbar buttons, the toolbar may need to scroll in the direction of text (e.g., horizontally in a vertically scrolling page). This Success Criterion therefore does not apply to interfaces which provide toolbars.”
https://www.w3.org/WAI/WCAG21/Understanding/reflow


The alternative might be an endless vertical scroller and could be worse implemented vertically.

So I think we need to document this exception.

Jonathan

Jonathan Avila, CPWA
Chief Accessibility Officer
Level Access
jon.avila@levelaccess.com
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From: Alastair Campbell <acampbell@nomensa.com>
Sent: Thursday, September 6, 2018 4:17 PM
To: David MacDonald <david100@sympatico.ca>
Cc: Dick <wayneedick@gmail.com>; WCAG <w3c-wai-gl@w3.org>
Subject: RE: Horizontal scrolling & reflow

> Under your example of western text that is wider than the viewport,

My example wasn’t a block of text, but if it was, it would be like that for everyone on a small mobile device as well.  I.e. really annoying and I’ve not seen an example like that in the wild.

What I have seen is things like Netflix & Amazon’s horizontal rows of movies/products that are carousels or side-scrollers.

For example, the video side-scrollers on this page:
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Amazon-Video/b/ref=nav_shopall_aiv?ie=UTF8&node=3010085031


Each ‘card’ in that section of content fits within the viewport, so there is no disadvantage. On a touch screen you can swipe it along nicely, or use the scroll bar. (I’m not recommending anything else about this page.)

The bbc.co.uk homepage (you’d need a VPN to see that) has a nice example that scrolls as well as having left/right buttons. Apart from being too tall in that case, I’d be hard pressed to find any issue with it.

Using the native scrolling in the browser is far better than the site trying to implement its own touch-swiping gestures, which is likely to cause interface issues.

So we can say that type of feature is a fail of reflow, or we allow for that and let go of the unlikely scenario where a designer/developer intends for people to scroll in two directions to read text.

Cheers,

-Alastair