Re: warning category for techniques / failures.

Hi Sailesh,

I see the issue you describe, but I wonder if it is something that WCAG can address as you’ve suggested?

There might be some overlap between “warnings" (as discussed) and "Techniques misapplied”, but the difference appears to be the level of knowledge of the author.

Based on the examples:

- "Technique Misapplied” implies the author knows something about accessibility (or thinks they do), but hasn’t applied it well.
- “Warning” implies the author doesn’t know something, and hasn’t included a feature needed, or has included an inaccessible feature.

Warnings should be failures which may not always be failures in all circumstances, but I’m not clear that the Techniques Misapplied are failures under the success criteria? For example, ARIA landmarks not covering all the content isn’t derived from the SC (even with David’s new proposed failure).

I would have thought that mis-application is solved by showing people how to do it properly?

I can’t see a scenario where designers/developers would be looking for information like “have I got this form label right?”. It is usually “how do I make form controls accessible”. If they mis-apply it they aren’t checking and aren’t reading about it.

I don’t think the WCAG techniques/failures is the right place for that information, as you said it is the flip-side of best-practices, which is also something that doesn’t fit in the techniques/failures.

Cheers,

-Alastair





Sailesh Panchang wrote:

>Hello All,
>"Techniques misapplied" is a more pressing category that needs to be introduced.
>Misapplication or incorrect / incomplete application of a technique  results in content that is meant to be more accessible (because efforts have been spent in making it accessible) less so.
>The underlying principle for "Techniques misapplied"  is sort of stated in S508 1194.21 (d) that states: 
>"Applications shall not disrupt or disable activated features of other products that are identified as accessibility features,..." 
>
>Consider the following examples. These  break the ability of users to use a feature of AT. Or, users cannot use a feature to reliably navigate or operate or understand content. It is likely some other technique may have been employed to pass an SC but the presence of"techniques misapplied" introduces accessibility problems for users.
>Examples:
>1. Using title attribute instead of explicit label association for form control ... or doing both!
>2. Setting a title attribute on a link that duplicates link text
>3. Including an element's role in its name.
>e.g. alt="Apply button" on an INPUT type=image button  is read as "Apply button button" by screen readers
>4. Image link and text link for a product: side by side
>5. Setting identical table caption and summary attribute on a data table
>6. Incomplete use of ARIA landmarks: failing to mark main content and only using one or two landmarks like banner, contentinfo, search
>7. Using different heading tags across site at start of main content
>(see  Technique H42 examples : proper use of headings)
>8. Inconsistency: target of skip to content link and placement of main landmark
>
>This was covered at CSUN:
>http://www.mindoversight.com/csun/2016/Overview.html

>Thanks,
>Sailesh Panchang

Received on Wednesday, 4 May 2016 14:55:23 UTC