Understanding WCAG SC 1.4.4 Resize Text

Except for captions and images of text, text can be resized without assistive technology up to 200 percent without loss of content or functionality. (Level AA).
Resize Text Transcript
Hello everyone, today we’re going to talk about resize text. We’re also going to discuss its requirements, some failure scenarios, and how we can fix them.More often than not, most of us want larger fonts for better readability while reading content on our computers or handheld devices. For users with limited vision, this is essential as they cannot consume content or understand text-based UI controls in websites and mobile applications.
Now, let’s see what the success criterion says. It states that authors must allow users to scale the contents either by increasing the text size or by zooming the page up to 200% with the help of browsers. Where the browsers or other user agents do not support zooming, the author must provide a means to scale the contents without any breakage. While the user zooms the content up to 200% or adjusts the text size, the content must not break, overlap, be obscured, or be missing altogether from the screen.
Now, let’s look at some failure scenarios.
A blog site does not allow users to zoom up to 200%.
In a banking site, the entire menu in the header disappears when the user zooms up to 200%, and there is no way to see the menu.
In a product category page, all the left navigation links have their visible link text truncated, and there is no way users can see the complete link text.
On a product details page of an e-commerce site, the product images spill out onto the product title text when the user zooms the page to 200%.
Now, let’s understand how we can fix these issues.
One can use fluid layouts instead of fixed layouts while designing and developing the web pages.
One can allow the contents to scale evenly when users zoom the web pages to 200%.
If texts are truncated, one can make them completely visible on focus or through a “read more” link or button.
One can provide controls within the web page or application to scale the text up to 200%.
This is the end of the video. Thank you for joining. If you like the video, do like and subscribe.
This success criterion requires that the text – both static and that are part of user interface components that are visible to the users must be resizable (scalable) to 200% without the help of any assistive technologies like screen magnifiers. Even though the user agents like the browsers that meet UAG (User Agent Guidelines) 1.0 bear the responsibility of scaling or zooming the text up to 200%, it is the authors responsible for providing that support to the browsers.
What do I do as the content author?
The authors or developers have to ensure:
Who Benefits?
Users with low vision or limited vision who consume the content without any assistive technology but use browsers’ zoom functionality alone.
Great post. I have a query: The Success Criteria says that “text can be resized without assistive technology up to 200 percent without loss of content or functionality.”. I noticed that while using Chrome if we use the Zoom In and Zoom Out control (by clicking on More Options on Chrome or by using CTRL and +/-, the whole page is magnified. It doesn’t only magnifies the text but rather all the content.
When using Firefox or Safari browser, they have option for “Zoom text only” but this option is not available in Chrome browser (there is an extension called “Zoom Text Only” which achieves the same functionality as Firefox and Safari browser natively has).
My query is: does the success criteria says that only text should zoom to 200% or all the content should zoom to 200%?
+1