SC1.4.12: Some designers not confident that they understood the SC just from the headline summary

[jfhector]

Here's the current summary headline for reference:

Text spacing: Ensure that no information or functionality gets lost if users increase the space between lines, paragraphs, letters and words.

They scored its clarity 3/5.

They wrote "Paddings + margins?", "between lines of paragraph".

I wonder whether there's a way to write this headline summary in a clearer way.

[taliazdc]

I might be wrong but my understanding of this guideline is simply that the text spacing & corresponding components should be flexible around potential changes to text sizes & spacing.

An alternative way of wording this could be... :

Ensure that text content is flexible, so that if users locally change letter, word, line or paragraph spacing, the functionality and information remains.

Could be worth experimenting with changing the statements that say "ensure that no__" into "ensure that ___" and see how people respond

[jfhector]

I'm imagining that readers wouldn't know what "text content is flexible" means.

I'd also like to make the sentence as concrete as possible, and sound like plain spoken language.

I think that we should try to rewrite this in a number of different ways, and then pick one version that works best. This might not require a big fix, maybe just a tweak. I must say I'm not entirely sure what confused the 3 designers who read this. It might be that they didn't know how end users can change these settings. (That confused me initially)

[jfhector]

Here's another attempt, I'll try to come up with more:

Make sure that all information and functionality remains available if users increase the space between lines of text, paragraphs, letters and words.

[jfhector]

Actually, a good next step would be to show the current wording to a few people and see how they interpret it and what they think is clear / unclear about it.

[taliazdc]

would it worth be doing a cloze test?

[jfhector]

Let me Google that :)

Sounds cool. Maybe as well as, rather than instead of. But if you think it's the right tool go for it :)