Do not clip or truncate text at 200% zoom
Text enlarged to 200% gets cut off, swallowed by an ellipsis, or dropped on top of the paragraph beside it, so the one thing a low-vision reader can do for themselves is the thing that breaks the page. F69 is the failure technique for that, and it comes with a caution W3C prints twice on its own page. The working group has found that this failure is widely misunderstood, plans to revise it, and says that until then, content passing 1.4.4 by any sufficient technique does not meet this failure at all, whatever the clipping looks like. So it is a real defect and a contestable one. Three causes account for most of it. Overflow set to hidden, absolutely positioned content with nowhere to go, and popups sized for the old font. Captions and images of text sit outside 1.4.4 either way.
How we find it in an audit
Clipping is a visual judgment, so this is hand testing. We run text-only zoom and browser zoom to 200% across the key templates, then sweep for cut labels, lines lying over each other, and buttons whose word has gone missing. Screenshots of every break go into the finding, because a screenshot is what settles the argument. Where a page still satisfies 1.4.4 through a sufficient technique, we write the clipping up as a defect in its own right rather than as F69, which is what W3C's caution asks for.
How affected users experience it
Low-vision readers who enlarge text to read at all take this one head on. The sentence they just made bigger is missing its second half. A button reads Con and the rest of the word has gone. Nothing warns them, so the natural read is that the page is broken rather than that the zoom did it, and the usual next move is to zoom back down and squint.
Passes vs. fails
Passes
.card { min-height: 80px; }Fails
.card { height: 80px; overflow: hidden; }How this gets tested
The W3C publishes test rules that define what a checker looks for here.
- Meta viewport allows for zoomA tool can check this
- Zoomed text node is not clipped with CSS overflowA tool finds candidates, you decide
The other techniques filed under this rule
15 guides on this site are filed under 1.4.4 Resize Text. W3C documents this one as a failure of that rule, so it describes a way the rule gets broken rather than a way to pass it.
- C12sufficientSize text in percent so it scales
- C13sufficientUse named font sizes that respect user defaults
- C14sufficientSize text in em units, not pixels
- C28sufficientSize text containers in em units
- G142sufficientBuild with technologies whose browsers support zoom
- G146sufficientUse liquid layouts that fit any window
This guide is our interpretation of W3C technique F69: Failure of Success Criterion 1.4.4 when resizing visually rendered text up to 200 percent causes the text, image or controls to be clipped, truncated or obscured. W3C publishes its techniques as guidance rather than as the standard, and says so on every one of them. The success criterion is what conformance is measured against, and a technique is one documented way to meet it.