RE: ‘Immediately surrounding text’ meaning in SC 3.1.2

This is also not an authoritative answer, but I’d say In simple terms it conveys “…become part the vernacular of the sentence or paragraph in which they appear."

I suspect there were 2 edge cases they were trying to address by using “immediately surrounding text":

  1.
When the  information appears in chunks of information that are not prose --say cells in a table--and ’sentence or paragraph’ doesn’t fit.
  2.
Where the chunk of information  that follows the ‘foreign’ phrase is in a different language than the chunk of information that precedes it. Say, in our table example, the phrase is part of one cell, and different columns of the text are in different languages. If you say “adjacent”, it doesn’t quite work.

Mike

From: Patrick H. Lauke <redux@splintered.co.uk>
Date: Friday, September 26, 2025 at 1:36 AM
To: public-wcag2-issues@w3.org <public-wcag2-issues@w3.org>
Subject: [EXTERNAL] Re: ‘Immediately surrounding text’ meaning in SC 3.1.2

Not an authoritative answer, but my take on this is that conceptually,
"surrounding" and "adjacent" have subtly different meanings (though
arguably both are still quite vague, as they still can be interpreted as
meaning *visually* surrounding/adjacent, whereas technically this is
about the programmatic context (e.g. the paragraph element, or other
container element, that the word/phrase is in).

"Surrounding" suggest more that the word/phrase is contained *inside*
something, while "adjacent" would also apply to *sibling* text (e.g. in
a separate paragraph that precedes/follows the current paragraph that
the word/phrase is in).

P
--
Patrick H. Lauke

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