Wix Sites: Issues with Website’s Responsiveness

Contents

  1. The issue
  2. The solution (there isn’t one)
  3. What to do for the project

The issue

For those of you using Wix sites for your project, I probably gave you feedback to this effect:

The website is not fully responsive. Collapsing the width of the web browser or zooming in to 200% requires the user to scroll horizontally on every line (an operability issue).

This is due to the viewport settings in Wix’s themes. Here’s what I mean:

Viewport setting on Hello World Civ

This is what the page source looks like for Hello World Civ (a fully responsive website that adjusts with the size of the browser window and zoom). In line 6, the viewport setting is “width=device-width.” This means the webpage is telling the browser to adjust all content based on the size of the window or device.

Highlighted line of code for viewport settings

Viewport setting on Wix sites

This is what the page source looks like for a Wix site. Line 32 contains a static width (“width=980”). Wix sites do change this for mobile (“width=320”) but do not dynamically adjust for sizes in between.

Highlighted line of code for viewport settings

The solution

There is no solution for this – which is shoddy work on Wix’s part. As far as I can tell, Wix does not offer an option to adjust the viewport setting. Their best advice is simply to not design outside the 980-pixel width.

If anyone has found a better solution, please let me know immediately.

What to do for the project

In order to still have a shot at full credit in the accessibility category of the Final Project Rubric, you will need to:

  1. Do your best to design within the pixel limits of your Wix site.
  2. Check all other accessibility issues or features on your site. Refer back to the WCAG 2.0 checklist and check your page’s source code.
  3. Include a brief statement (1-2 paragraphs) on your website detailing any known accessibility issues at the time of submission. This statement should be accessible from your navigation menu so the issues are transparent.

If you already submitted your project and would like to adjust things to meet these new requirements, please contact me to work out details.

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