Orientation
Content must not be locked to a single orientation — portrait or landscape — unless that orientation is essential. Users mounted to a wheelchair or holding a phone in a fixed grip can't rotate the device.
What it asks
If a website or app forces the device into portrait or landscape, users who have their phone or tablet mounted in a fixed orientation — wheelchair tray, hospital bed, ergonomic stand — are locked out. The site must adapt to whichever orientation the device is held in, unless the content fundamentally requires one (a piano keyboard, a check-deposit photo, an immersive VR experience).
How to meet it
- Don’t use CSS like
@media (orientation: portrait) { display: none; }to hide the site outside one orientation. - Avoid screen-orientation lock APIs (
screen.orientation.lock('portrait')) on the web; on native, lock only when essential. - Build a responsive layout that works both orientations — flexbox and CSS grid handle this without special cases.
- Test the site rotated on a real phone — many bugs only show on devices where the landscape viewport is short.
- For essential orientations (a signature pad), tell the user clearly why and how to rotate.
Common failures
- “Please rotate your device to portrait” overlay that blocks all content in landscape on tablets.
- App that ships with
android:screenOrientation="portrait"for no functional reason. - A banking site that works fine in portrait but renders a broken layout in landscape with no fix.
- Onboarding flow that detects landscape and forces a “rotate your phone” interstitial.
Why it matters
Affects power-wheelchair users especially — a tablet on a wheelchair mount is fixed in one orientation. Also affects anyone using a phone one-handed with the screen lock on. Cheap to fix at design time, expensive to retrofit if the entire layout was built portrait-first.