Hi everyone. Josh here with Online ADA, and in this video we’re gonna cover 1.3.4, Orientation.This is the first of the newest articles to come out, the 2.1 guidelines and this is a AA level requirement.
Let’s jump into the description. ‘Content does not restrict its view and operation to a single display orientation, such as portrait or landscape, unless a specific display orientation is essential’.
This is not a very complicated article. This is one of the few articles that actually apply to, like mobile devices. And the gist of this article is saying that we should not restrict view to only be landscape or only be portrait. And that’s to say that if you had a mobile phone, and you have content like, let’s say a survey or something, displayed in portrait, and if you turn your phone to landscape, if the user of the mobile phone has turned on portraits switching or landscape mode, then it should switch to landscape to show you that content in landscape format.
Programmatically speaking, it is possible to lock it to portrait so that when you turn it, even with the landscape or the switching mode turned on, it would stay in portrait. We wanna avoid that because there are lots of cases where someone might be in a, like a chair and they might have a a screen that comes up that is assistive technology for them and they can only use the landscape format. So if you had it locked to portrait than all the content will be sideways and unusable. And it’s just important to make sure that that feature is not locked so that is naturally turning one way or another.
There are exceptions to this, however. Some of those exceptions are something like a bank check. It would be essential for the bank check to be read in its normal orientation. It wouldn’t make sense if it was read in a different orientation, so that would be considered essential. There are different applications that make, might make sense as well. Like a piano application wouldn’t make sense if it was a sideways, like if you have a portrait view of the piano application you wanna turn it landscape to be able to use it, or something.
PDF readers, often times, will give you the option to turn landscape and you’ll see, like a single page view and the reader in portrait and then you switch it over, you’ll have, like two page view. That’s a great example of well executed orientation.
The types of users that this article is benefiting are folks with low dexterity or situations where they have to have a fixed orientation because their device is mounted to something. And also users with low vision or vision impairments. They can turn, often times, on a mobile device, they can turn to landscape and get bigger text and a bigger wider layout.
That’s it for this article. Thanks for joining me and I’ll see you the next video.