RE: 1.4.12 - Text Spacing

It’s not meaningless at all, and it places some requirements on authors. For instance, if the text is in a fixed-size container, it may be truncated when the various spacing styles are applied.

I am currently testing a website in which the author wants data tables to contain only one line of text. There is no good reason for this, but it’s what they want. With normal text spacing it looks ok, but some of the text is no longer visible when the spacing styles are applied, because the table cells have the styles “overflow: hidden; white-space: nowrap; text-overflow: ellipsis”.

I have seen other cases where the text is not truncated, but it flows outside its container and is displayed against a different background colour that results in insufficient colour contrast.

Steve Green
Managing Director
Test Partners Ltd


From: Andrew Somers <andy@generaltitles.com>
Sent: Saturday, September 9, 2023 2:21 PM
To: w3c-wai-ig@w3.org
Cc: Patrick H. Lauke <redux@splintered.co.uk>
Subject: Re: 1.4.12 - Text Spacing


1.4.12 is, perhaps, not the best written SC because it really just handwaves over many common scenarios

1.4.12 is essentially meaningless. It is not demanding that any content be set/formatted as described**, only that users be able to set content as described, at the user’s preference, yet without actually requiring any means to be provided for the user to do so.

Once again, this is a technology issue and not a content-author issue. The ability to make such adjustments belongs in the hands of the creators of user agents and browser apps. It is less than useful to recite it to authors of content.

At most, this may say “shall not use images of text content” unless there’s a verbatim accessible alt text, as covered by other SCs.


Footnote
**nor should it be, the proscribed typesetting specs are themselves meaningless as the metrics used vary widely based on font family, and WCAG2 does not provide a canonical reference font.



Sent from Andy’s iPhone


On Sep 8, 2023, at 08:24, Patrick H. Lauke <redux@splintered.co.uk<mailto:redux@splintered.co.uk>> wrote:

On 08/09/2023 15:32, Marc Haunschild wrote:


SVG will fail several SCs, not just reflow, but also you cannot change text spacing, colors and other characteristics of the text…

Well you *can* in some cases (if text is still actual text, rather than vector shapes/outlines), just with greater difficulty...

But yes, by their very nature I'd personally say 1.4.12 and SVGs don't mix all that well, and I would N/A them.

(I would actually say that 1.4.12 is, perhaps, not the best written SC because it really just handwaves over many common scenarios, but it is what it is...)

P
--
Patrick H. Lauke

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