Re: Reflow updates follow up

Alastair,
I don’t believe that there was agreement that the original intent was “down to” – this was discussed during 2.1 development and due to the additional testing demand was not adopted.

In https://github.com/w3c/wcag21/issues/335 there were proposals to this same effect that were not accepted.

Related discussion on Nov 14, 2017: https://www.w3.org/2017/11/14-ag-minutes.html#item03


Thanks,
AWK

Andrew Kirkpatrick
Head of Accessibility
Adobe

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


From: Alastair Campbell <acampbell@nomensa.com>
Date: Tuesday, July 14, 2020 at 7:58 PM
To: WCAG <w3c-wai-gl@w3.org>
Subject: Reflow updates follow up
Resent-From: WCAG <w3c-wai-gl@w3.org>
Resent-Date: Tuesday, July 14, 2020 at 7:58 PM

Hi everyone,

A couple of weeks ago we discussed the potential reflow updates:
https://www.w3.org/2020/07/07-ag-minutes.html#item02


That was basically left as: Can we find out what issues (if any) changing reflow to “down to” would cause.

Just trying to summarise the discussion:


  *   “Down to” was the original intent and aligns with the user-need.
  *   It appears most sites do that anyway (which cuts both ways, why change, why not change?)
  *   It would catch bugs / odd cases where mistake have been made.
  *   It requires more effort to test.

We discussed whether we could apply the change and ask for feedback as part of a wider review. There was some pushback on that, saying we should find out before review.

We discussed gathering feedback about the change, so (taking chair hat off) I’ll kick this off:

Across our client-base (mostly national & regional organisations, private & public sector) for accessibility testing and design/development work, we’re already design/coding/testing for this. Not per-pixel testing, but definitely per 50% zoom increase and watch for discrepancies.

I also asked on twitter:
https://twitter.com/alastc/status/1280535723561623552?s=20


Comments included:

  *   It fixes a gap, doesn’t affect testing effort, better for users.
  *   The only time (this person) hits limitations is with legacy in-house systems.
[AC: Which wouldn’t aim for WCAG 2.2, and would have trouble with “at 320px” as well.]
  *   Testing will be more time consuming as you have to test for way more different width for every page.

I don’t have a great reach on twitter, but our client base is pretty wide and includes organisations with small custom builds up to ‘enterprise’ tech, such as that provided by some larger W3C members. CRMs, CMSs etc.

I’m starting to come to the conclusion that unless we can find problematic instances (that would be aiming for 2.2), we don’t have a better opportunity to gather this sort of feedback except via a wide review…

Kind regards,

-Alastair

--

www.nomensa.com<http://www.nomensa.com/> / @alastc