Re: Validation as test for basic accessibility

Hi,

I agree that validation is a major step towards accessibility. In fact, I 
exposed at [1] a sentence classifing the accessibillty guaranteed by 
several XHTML dialects. I found that the following XHTML dialects are 
ordered in an increasing accesibility level, because some of the WCAG 
techniques are represented in their DTD or Schema (required atributes or 
required elements, for example).

XHTML 1.0 Transitional
XHTML 1.0 Strict
XHTML 1.1
XHTML Basic 1.0
XHTML 2.0

As long as a Web page validates against most of the previous ones (if it 
is XHTML Basic 1.0 it will pretty surely validate all others except XHTML 
2.0), there are some (not all) WCAG techniques guaranteed to be OK.

[1] http://www.it.uc3m.es/vlc/wai/wcag20formal.html#doctype

P.S.: Of course, I am not saying that validity implies accessibility, but 
validity may imply conformance to "some" WCAG techniques. On the other 
hand, I found that XHTML Basic 1.0 is a subset of XHTML 1.1, which is a 
subset of XHTML 1.0 Strict which is a subset of XHTML 1.0 Transitional. 
This implies that the stricter XHTML, the more accessible.

Vicente Luque Centeno
Dep. Ingeniería Telemática
Universidad Carlos III de Madrid
http://www.it.uc3m.es/vlc