Amy Carney talks about text that gets cut off

Amy says that if you cut text off and don't provide a way to expand it, she can't read your content. Transcript Nic Hi, I'm Nic Steenhout, and you're listening to the accessibility rules soundbite, a series of short podcasts where disabled people explain their impairment, and what barriers they encounter on the web. Today, I'm talking to Amy Carney, again, Hey, Amy, how are you? Amy Hi, Nic. Good. Nic Good, good. For those people who haven't heard your previous interviews, can you tell us a little bit about what your disability is? Amy Yeah, so I have a visual impairments. It's kind of just on the edge of low vision. I don't have lenses in my eyes that were removed when I was just a baby. So they have that medical term for me called afakik. And so my glasses that I wear are my lenses, externally. So what I have is just usually just enough to get by as a sighted person. Nic What's your barrier? What's your big pet peeve you'd like to share about accessibility with with the audience today? Amy One of the things that I've encountered a lot, even in 2022, is on apps, as well as web pages that there's a trend to going of text that gets cut off, usually due to a box of a fixed height. And so information whether they want me to click on it to read more or not. It ends in three little dots, an ellipsis. And sometimes it doesn't even end it just cuts off. Because the content doesn't reflow to push down the blocks to be any taller. And so I'll miss out on content that's hidden away from me. And the real problem with ellipsis is that if there's no where to click to read more, that they just included paragraph in that spot, then I miss out on what the rest of the paragraph is. And I can't read more to see what they're trying to tell me. Nic Hhmm What's the solution to that? Amy Hmm. Allowing the box to expand? Nic Allowing the box to expend, ok yeah. All right. Amy So we're having a clickable area, if they really are set on a fixed height, I'm fine with going to another page or having a dialog box open up. I just like to see what's there. Nic Yeah, because a lot of designers today seem to really like this dot dot dot at the end of a line? Amy Yeah, cuz it, it lets people know that there is more to it. But it's like the second step was forgotten if there's more to it. How do I read more to that thing? Nic Yeah. Amy And so Nic I seem to encounter that pattern more when you reach the so called mobile view, you know, you even if you test on desktop, because you've resized your browser, you seem to come across that more more often in mobile view. Is that something that that you'd say, is that accurate? Amy I think so. Um, I really hate it. When people do that. For mobile apps, especially I have actually deleted some when they've updated their UI, to the user interface to, you know, improve the layout, I don't know if it's, I'm wondering if the design idea is to have more things to look at in one space. And so they kind of compress. But in the same instance, say, like a weather app that I had to delete, not only did the font get smaller, and it didn't coordinate with the size of font that I wanted on my system, but it also cut off with an ellipsis. And so here, there's this supporting weather information, and I can't get to it and on top of it. Sometimes when people do that, I will turn my phone to landscape. And it didn't have a landscape view. It was stuck in portrait. And so I could not get a lot of information. And it was just like, Well, okay, so this app is unusable to me. So now I have to just find a different one was there was too much information cut off. It was too small, I couldn't rotate. It was a lot of things I couldn't do with it. Nic If you want to know about the weather, you just stick your nose outside Amy [Laughter] Lick my finger Nic If you had one message for designers or developers today around access