RE: I feel that the 2 sufficient techniques should be 'and' not 'or'.

Hi Loretta,

You've completely missed my point.  If H69 etc is used to pass this
criterion you are only helping screen reader users.

What about those of us who navigate with the keyboard but are sighted, ie do
not use assistive technology of any sort?  Correct heading structure is of
no benefit what-so-ever to us.

If you don't want an AND, perhaps 2.4.1 should be split into two
requirements so that the first requirement is to provide a method for
keyboard users to bypass blocks and the second requirement is to provide a
method for AT users to bypass blocks.  As we both know there is a precedent
for splitting a single SC into various requirements - 1.4.8.

Sheena
  -----Original Message-----
  From: Loretta Guarino Reid [mailto:lorettaguarino@google.com]
  Sent: 23 March 2011 16:39
  To: sheena.mccullagh@blueyonder.co.uk
  Cc: public-comments-wcag20@w3.org
  Subject: Re: I feel that the 2 sufficient techniques should be 'and' not
'or'.


  On Sat, Feb 19, 2011 at 3:58 PM, <noreply@w3.org> wrote:


    Name: Sheena McCullagh
    Email: sheena.mccullagh@blueyonder.co.uk
    Affiliation: Individual
    Document: W2
    Item Number: Success Criterion 2.4.1
    Part of Item:
    Comment Type: technical
    Summary of Issue: I feel that the 2 sufficient techniques should be
'and' not 'or'.
    Comment (Including rationale for any proposed change):
    I had originally read this that 1 and 2 were exactly that an 'and', then
someone I know who does accessibility testing for a living, pointed out to
me that I was wrong. They are not 'and', ie you can do one or the other.
However I see a problem with that:

    Skip links are of main benefit to sighted users who navigate via the
keyboard and are of only very limited benefit to screen reader users.
However H69 (heading elements) is only of use to screen readers and provides
no help whatsoever for sighted users navigating via the keyboard. (I don't
know enough about map, frame and scripting to comment on those, but as they
have been grouped with H69, I suspect that they too are of little or no
benefit to sighted people who navigate with the keyboard.)

    Nonetheless, if someone writes a web page to H69, they would be deemed
to have passed SC 2.4.1, even though they have not provided any method for
sighted keyboard users to bypass blocks of content that are repeated on
multiple pages.  The most number of hits of the tab key that I counted
before getting to the main page content on one web site was 69 each time I
went onto a new page.

    Proposed Change:
    Please make it 'and' so that both sighted keyboard users and screen
reader users are helped.  At the moment it's perfectly possible to help only
one of those groups and not help the other and still pass this SC.


  ==============================
  ==
  Response from the Working Group
  ================================
  It is only necessary to implement one of the listed sufficient techniques
for this, or any other, success criterion. Authors may choose to implement
more than one technique to improve usability, of course.

  Skip links may not be the preferred mechanism for screen reader users, but
links work for them, so skip links will permit them to skip over the
repeated content.

  The User Agent Notes for H69 discuss the native support for navigating by
headings that is provided in Opera, and notes that for other browsers,
plugins may be needed. Authors who rely on H69 must ensure that it is
accessibility supported for their users.

  Loretta Guarino Reid, WCAG WG Co-Chair
  Gregg Vanderheiden, WCAG WG Co-Chair
  Michael Cooper, WCAG WG Staff Contact


  On behalf of the WCAG Working Group