Level AA · WCAG 2.1
1.3.4 Orientation
Content works in both portrait and landscape, unless a specific orientation is genuinely essential.
Automated A failure is reliably detectable.
How it fails in practice
A mobile checkout locked to portrait. Someone with a wheelchair-mounted tablet cannot rotate their device to match your assumption.
How to fix it
Remove the orientation lock and let the layout reflow. Reserve the lock for the rare case — a piano keyboard, a cheque scanner — where the task itself has an orientation.
At a glance
- Level
- Level AA — the level EN 301 549 requires, and therefore the level the BFSG and the EAA are measured against.
- Principle
- Perceivable
- Guideline
- 1.3 Adaptable
- Added in
- WCAG 2.1
- EN 301 549
- 9.1.3.4
- Automated check
- Automated
Automated
How far an automated check gets
A tool can decide this one. A failure is a measurable fact, and finding none is real evidence rather than an absence of looking — which makes this one of the few criteria where a clean automated result means something on its own.
Related criteria
Other criteria under the same guideline.
Find out which criteria your site fails
We scan up to 100 pages against WCAG 2.2 AA, run the agent protocol on one key journey and send you the report — free, once, no strings.