- From: Wendy A Chisholm <wendy@w3.org>
- Date: Fri, 12 Jul 2002 14:37:23 -0400
- To: jasonw@ariel.ucs.unimelb.edu.au
- Cc: w3c-wai-gl@w3.org
Hello, Yesterday, I had a hard time explaining an issue about mapping technology-specific "rules" to success criteria. Here is an attempt to make it clearer. User agent support is one aspect of the problem. However, I am primarily concerned that the minimum level success criteria for checkpoint 1.3 make all HTML structural elements equally important. In other words, it seems that some HTML structural elements are more important to accessibility than others, but the minimum level success criteria put them all at the same importance. The minimum level success criteria for checkpoint 1.3 are: 1. any information that is conveyed through presentation formatting is also provided in either text or structure. 2. the following can be derived programmatically (i.e. through AT compatible markup or data model) from the content without interpreting presentation. a. any hierarchical elements and relationships, such as headings, paragraphs and lists b. any non-hierarchical relationships between elements such as cross-references and linkages, associations between labels and controls, associations between cells and their headers, etc. c. any emphasis My interpretation of this puts all HTML structural elements at the same priority. Here are all of the structural elements (per [1] which was derived from the HTML 4.01 spec) A ABBR ACRONYM AREA BLOCKQUOTE BODY BUTTON CAPTION CITE CODE COL COLGROUP DD DFN DIR* (deprecated) DIV DL DT EM FIELDSET FORM H1-H6 HEAD HTML INPUT ISINDEX* (deprecated) KBD LABEL LEGEND LI MAP MENU* (deprecated) OL OPTGROUP OPTION P Q SAMP SELECT SPAN STRONG TABLE TBODY TD TEXTAREA TFOOT TH THEAD TR UL VAR These seem to fall into 2 categories: 1. those elements that genuinely provide structure, are commonly used, and make a much larger accessibility impact when they are used. e.g. H1-H6, UL, OL LI, TH, LABEL, etc. 2. those elements that are not commonly used or supported and do not provide a large accessibility benefit. e.g. CITE, VAR, KBD, etc. They don't provide a sizable benefit because if you don't know that something is a citation by the markup hopefully you can glean that from the context. Unlike headings which can be used as navigation markers as well as create the structure that the document is built on. Does this make more sense now? Can you see how a sub-priority scheme is almost forming from this? Or do you think they are all equally important? This might be an incorrect premise on my part (that some are less important to accessibility than others). I look forward to answering Jason's question from yesterday's call, "Is this an isolated instance or is it part of a more general problem?" I still need to find the notes from our talk last November, Jason. Best, --wendy p.s. Yesterday I mentioned an overlap between 1.3 and 3.1. This is a separate issue. [1] http://www.w3.org/TR/2000/NOTE-WCAG10-HTML-TECHS-20000920/#html-index -- wendy a chisholm world wide web consortium web accessibility initiative seattle, wa usa /--
Received on Friday, 12 July 2002 14:27:22 UTC