Re: Success criteria 1.4.4

To All,
This discussion is a learning opportunity. Accessible design for
visual readers with low vision is serious and difficult problem. Many
problems for blindness have been solved, but most of these do not help
people with low vision. A young web designer who really wants to make
a significant discovery could really make a name here.

I have had low vision since birth, and I do expect my print to stay in
one screen when I enlarge. That is the accessible thing to do. SC
1.4.4 is a good criterion because if you can make a page that looks
reasonable at 200% it is well written. It is an acid test.

Zoom and SC 1.44. are there for people like me, a visual reader with
low vision. The text only zoom you get with Safari and Firefox are
great.

You might want to look at my 2-to-1 example below. It deals with
column bleeding that occurs with multi column pages that use
positioned <div> elements. It doesn't take much zoom to make these
columns slop into each other.
http://www.csulb.edu/~wed/public/0003_AccessTool/2-to-1/2-to-1.html
You don't have to give up style for accessibility.

Also, here are some examples of things that really cause horizontal
scrolling -- if you would like to avoid that. I think of these as the
unforgivable configurations.

Common Layout Table Overflow:
http://www.csulb.edu/~wed/public/0003_AccessTool/Lay-Tab-Ov.html/LayTabOv.html
Horizontal Navigation Bar Overflow:
http://www.csulb.edu/~wed/public/0003_AccessTool/Lay-Tab-Men.html/LayTabMenu.html

These example give only partial solutions.

Other accessibility techniques are needed. CSS 3 allows you to force
wrapping of links. That helps a lot. Most pages don't look good
enlarged, but they should work, and they should never under any
circumstances force horizontal scrolling to read a text region, or
cause columns to bleed across each other. Sometimes you must scroll
horizontally to move from one text region to another, but text lines
should always fit on one screen. That is the challenge. Good web
designers will figure out how to do it.

Look at helping visual readers as a challenge. There is lot to
discover if you want to help this group. It is a huge population. If
you want to discover something new in web technology, this is a place
to do it.

Wayne Dick PhD.
Professor Emeritus Department of Computer Engineering and Computer Science
California State University, Long Beach

Received on Saturday, 20 August 2011 19:21:19 UTC