Orientation

Why it matters

For most visitors a rotation lock is an annoyance they solve by turning the phone. For somebody whose tablet is bolted to a wheelchair in landscape, a portrait-only checkout is a wall. The workaround everybody else reaches for is the exact thing they cannot do. There is a second group that gets forgotten. Low-vision users often turn a phone to landscape on purpose, because a wider line lets them run a larger text size without every sentence breaking into fragments. Lock the orientation and you have taken away their text-size strategy along with everything else.

Who this rule protects

Users with motor disabilities whose device is mounted in a fixed position, on a wheelchair arm or a bed frame, cannot rotate it at all. Anyone using a stand or a dock that holds one orientation is in the same position. Low-vision users who read in landscape to fit more words on a line lose that option too.

How to check it yourself

1. 1Open the key pages on a phone and rotate it. Both orientations have to give you a layout you can use and operate, rather than only look at.
2. 2Look for a "please rotate your device" message, which is a failure in its own right. Detecting orientation is fine. Answering it by refusing to show the content is not.
3. 3Search the stylesheets for a media query on orientation combined with a rotate or a transform, since that is how a web page locks itself.
4. 4Do not mistake a different layout in landscape for a failure. Changing the design by screen size sits outside this rule. Only restricting the orientation sits inside it.
5. 5Where a view genuinely seems to need one orientation, ask whether the same information could be delivered another way that conforms. If it could, the exception does not apply.

Failures we see most often

• A checkout page shows a "rotate to portrait" overlay the moment the device is in landscape, so a mounted device cannot buy anything.
• A CSS rotation applied on the orientation media query cancels the device's own turn, so the content stays put however the user holds the phone.
• An installed web app declares a single orientation in its manifest with no reason behind it.
• A chart is readable only in landscape and no other version of the same numbers exists anywhere on the site.

Who this one is for

Read from this rule's own note above, so the grouping and the note cannot disagree.

• Low visionpeople who can see the screen but not easily
• Motor and keyboard-onlypeople who cannot use a mouse, or cannot use one precisely

How this one is tested

We list 1 ACT rule against 1.3.4. Each one defines exactly what a checker looks at, which is how automated tools decide what to flag. Each one also checks a slice, so passing every rule here is not the same as meeting the criterion, and a rule can be proposed rather than approved or need a person to finish it. The note beside each says which.

• Orientation of the page is not restricted using CSS transformsA tool can check this

How to fix it

• Build responsive layouts that adapt to both orientations, and test landscape on a phone specifically, not only on a tablet where there is more room to hide the problem.
• Remove the rotate-to-continue overlay. If the layout is poor in landscape, fix the layout. The message is a failure, and the layout was only a weakness.
• Where one orientation really is required, add a control that lets a user reach the content in the other one anyway. That is the only sufficient technique listed for this criterion, which tells you how narrow the exception is.
• Leave the device setting alone. Where a user has locked their whole device to one orientation, every application picks that up, and a page that does not restrict itself honors it automatically.

Passes vs. fails