FW: Questions about the 1.4.12 Text Spacing Success Criteria

Hello Community,



A few clarifications are needed on the text spacing from a designer's prospective. Hope will get the confusion clear.



  *   I look at the bullet summary and saw "word spacing" and finds that there is no trick available to use this thing in figma. I did some digging and found this answer in the forums: https://forum.figma.com/t/meeting-wcag-text-guidelines-in-figma/22611 Do you think this line about "Author Responsibility" (Is that developer or someone else) holds water? And if an organization relies heavily on prototypes to communicate all the specs needed to implement something in actual code/production, how can it be ensured?

  *   If a tool like Figma doesn't let you use "word-space" property for text, how can we test this? Have you heard of testing this criterion in design tools or should it fall on dev/QA in implementation to assess that the implementation would meet the 1.4.12 success criteria?
  *   One of the property mentioned: "Letter spacing (tracking) to at least 0.12 times the font size" How should that be calculated? Should that be assumed as 12% of a value or we need to just calculate the font size*.12 (16px*.12) and similarly for the other property as well.
  *   Concerning point #2, is that possible for the designers to test it completely in the tools, and if yes then how it can be done?

The first image shows the text in the container with three lines and line height in 1 rem without text spacing.
[Image showing the text in the container with three lines and line height in 1 rem.]

This image shows the same image with text spacing properties added so is this will be a failure for the text spacing or meet the requirements? As the text gets overflow but the container size remains the same.
[image showing the same image with text spacing properties]


Thanks,
Ashish Jain
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