ATAG2 violates WCAG2 2.4.6 Headings and Labels

The 24th of April working draft [1] of the 'Authoring Tool 
Accessibility Guidelines (ATAG) 2.0' violates WCAG 2.0's section on 
Heading and Labels about 'Headings and labels describe topic or 
purpose. (Level AA)'. 

The problem is the *entire* Guidelines section. [3] Visually it looks 
OK. But in reality, it operates with *extremely* long headings. [3] 
Problem illustrations:

 1. The Guidelines section contains more heading elements (h1-h6)
    than paragraph elements (p).
 2. Take a look at section B.1.1.2. [4] It consists of a single 
    <h4> element whose source code counts 2690 characters. Or
    1194 rendered characters. Which equals roughly half a A4 page.
    (This is just one example - nearly all the headings in the
    Guidelines section are too long.)

When the entire content is turned into a heading, then the heading 
stops functioning as a heading. In addition to breaking with common 
sense, it also has to be a breakage of WCAG 2's level AA requirement to 
operate with headings and labels. [2]

(Oddly, no accessibility checkers seem to check heading lengths. And 
the WCAG 2.0 Success Criterion for headings doesn't mention this as a 
common mistake either.[5])

[1] http://www.w3.org/TR/2011/WD-ATAG20-20110426/

[2] http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG20/#navigation-mechanisms-descriptive

[3] http://www.w3.org/TR/2011/WD-ATAG20-20110426/#guidelines

[4] http://www.w3.org/TR/2011/WD-ATAG20-20110426/#sc_b112

[5] 
http://www.w3.org/TR/UNDERSTANDING-WCAG20/navigation-mechanisms-descriptive#navigation-mechanisms-descriptive-160-head

-- 
Leif Halvard Silli

Received on Sunday, 1 May 2011 17:56:06 UTC