Comment LC-1069

Comment 46:

Source: http://www.w3.org/mid/001f01c695f9$31b504e0$9288b23a@tkhcomputer
(Issue ID: LC-1069)

Stylesheets: It could be argued that the sequence of content can always be
programmatically determined- otherwise it could not be presented to the user
in that particular sequence. Because 1.3.3 maps to checkpoint 6.1, it is
obvious that what is meant by the WCAG2 SC is that if style sheets are used
to manipulate the layout of text, then the layout without style sheets must
present a meaningful alternative. However it can be argued that simply
because a user agent (ie browser) can interpret the style sheet to present
information in a certain way, that it is automatically programmatically
determinable.

Proposed Change:

Clarify the SC 1.3.3

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Response from Working Group:
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Please note that the the definition of programmatically determined
specifically covers support by assistive technologies: "determined by
software from author-supplied data provided in a way that different user
agents, including assistive technologies, can extract and present this
information to users in different modalities".

CSS can be used to position items visually on a page. While the position is
of course programatically determined, the reading order on the basis of CSS
positioning is not, because CSS lacks layout concepts such as "previous" or
"next" that would define, unambiguously, the proper reading order of a
graphical layout. In theory, advanced heuristics might be able to
extrapolate this information, but such approaches are not supported by
current tools so this is not a sufficient technique at this time. Therefore,
this success criterion does have relevance and it is recommended to follow
the sufficient techniques provided.
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Response from GSW:
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If this is the case then I believe that the term "programmatically
determined" should be replaced with something like "supported by AT". The
term "programmatically determined" indicates that information can be
determined programmatically which is not what it appears the Working Group
means at this point.

Received on Friday, 6 July 2007 15:17:48 UTC