CSUN: Browser zoom sucks for low vision users

Denis Boudreau and Wayne Dick presented on why browser zoom sucks, firstly from the point of view of testing with WCAG, and then from a low-vision user's point of view.

The are on slideshare.

Resize text criteria (Denis)

At Deque they have discussed and mulled over success criteria 1.4.4, resizing text, and they don't agree internally! (AC: This has also been an issue at my company.)

One of the specific aspects is the example where the W3C says that horizontal scroll bars are ok, so every site passes! Denis was struggling with the argument that text-sizing is still needed.

Denis is agnostic about the technology aspect, his preferred definition of that was: does not deliberately favor specific web technologies - Jared at webaim.

Denis sets up the argument (in boxing terms), where:

Web developers want easy solutions, reliable testing & measurable results. Therefore they like browser zoom.

Users was robust solutions, adaptive interfaces, usable content. Therefore they like text resize. (AC: I disagree with this premise if you are using Responsive Web Design (RWD), but they get to that later.)

The user base for low vision from world health organisation stats is: 285 million people with visual impairments, 39 million blind, 246 million have low vision (7 times as many).

Denis picks (on) the the Financial Post to test zoom, which at 200% zoom produces a lot of horizontal scrolling. That is really annoying (AC: Wholeheartedly agree!)

With text zoom the experience is better on this site. (AC: I did notice later that the navigation is unusable though.)

Low vision user - Wayne's section

Wayne comes on to introduce things from a low vision point of view.

When you started with Guttenberg, the print was pretty big! But as the technology got better and you could make smaller print sizes, it got smaller and smaller. It didn't keep shrinking though, it came down to a certain minimum. The "critical print size".

That created a normalisation of text for the "common reader".

Is zoom bad for everything? No!

Low vision users generally keep things as small as we can cope with, and then focus on things to zoom in.

One of the things about low-vision is the variety, a friend with a similar condition couldn't stand Wayne's methods of coping, it would make him puke!

Enlarged content presented for users with full sight is not the same as content presented for people with impaired vision. (AC: I didn't quite get what this meant in practical terms, can anyone add a comment about that?)

The lack of word wrapping when zooming creates "semantic discontinuity", i.e. the words don't proceed in order. The meaning should follow continuously down the page.

Basically, panning when reading really sucks.

Questions / My thoughts

At this point responsive web design (RWD) comes up, and it was essentially considered the future, although with caveats.

Denis mentioned our previous blog articles on this (his and mine).

After a few questions on that subject, there was general agreement that horizontal scrolling really sucks and the guidelines should account for that (more). When WCAG 2 was created 200% text-sizing was quite difficult to achieve. With RWD now I don't think that's a problem, for a 1024px wide screen zooming in 3 times means you get a mobile-sized version (300px wide). Most sites test RWD down to that level, so it should work.

Shawn Henry was in the audience and mentioned that it could be something that is updated in a future version of WCAG (or the associated documents).

NB: Recent stats show that around 12% of the top 10,000 sites are responsive now. I suspect most site re-designs are going to be RWD from now on.

Personally, I will put forward my proposal when SC 1.4.4 comes under review again.

What probably does need more discussion is how zoom on mobile works. For example, an RWD website does not re-flow when you zoom in, it is like desktop-zoom without RWD.