RE: Question: testing for non-unique id values SC 4.1.1

From: David MacDonald [mailto:david100@sympatico.ca]
Sent: Thursday, September 29, 2016 6:32 PM

 I don't think the phrase "...in content USING markup languages..."  is the same as "In markup content ..."
[Jason] Agreed.

I agree 4.1.1 is wider than it needs to be, and we should definitely adjust it for 2.1. There might be an argument to manage it in 2.0 via our interpretation in the understanding, if we can overcome Jason's concern.

[Jason] Normative changes can’t be made in the Understanding document, and I think this would require a normative change, not an interpretation.
Another concern arises from the implications for Web Annotations, a technology that has already been considered as a potential accessibility tool by those working on digital publishing standards. Third parties could annotate content with information that enhances accessibility for the user. If changes to the markup then break the annotations due to syntactic invalidity, it’s hard to see this as a failure of the content to meet other success criteria in WCAG, since the annotations that improve accessibility are provided externally.
An example from digital publishing discussions is that of offering annotations that associate tactile graphics, extended descriptions, etc., with graphics occurring in a book. (Some of these would move beyond what Guideline 1.1 requires, so the book could still be WCAG-conformant in itself.)
It may be infeasible to require content authors not to invalidate annotations, but maintaining a basic level of syntactic correctness seems more reasonable and achievable while having demonstrable benefits.
The use of external annotations to enhance the accessibility of content hasn’t seen much success so far; but COGA, digital publishing and other developments may be about to introduce entirely new classes of accessibility techniques that we’ll need to consider. For example, WCAG makes no provision for the use of haptics, tactile graphics, 3D models, simplified images or simplified descriptions as alternatives to images, but all of these have received serious discussion in digital publishing and educational contexts.


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