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

Ø  It doesn’t seem to be a stretch to count JavaScript created markup or DOM manipulation as part of “markup languages”.

I agree. I believe the intent of that clause was to specify which technologies were in or out and not to say that DOM manipulation wasn’t covered.   I agree some things likely won’t be an issue in situations where content is added to the DOM dynamically but the SC would still apply IMO.


Ø  If the APIs are the official way to do things, the usefulness of 4.1.1 has reduced as anything the browsers don’t interpret should be apparent to everyone, not just people using AT.

I disagree because the visual rendering engine of the browser is likely separate from the DOM to accessibility API bridge and the accessibility API is likely to contain issues that aren’t rutinely found by the browser QA teams.  Unless the browsers start implementing some sort of accessibility test harness and really be looking for them.  The API is also susceptable to issues IMO when it’s built/updated based on bad structure.  How does the DOM to API bridge handle bad markup and what decisions does it make in order to compenstate for incorrect markup/DOM structure?

Jonathan Avila
Chief Accessibility Officer
SSB BART Group
jon.avila@ssbbartgroup.com<mailto:jon.avila@ssbbartgroup.com>
703.637.8957 (Office)

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From: Alastair Campbell [mailto:acampbell@nomensa.com]
Sent: Friday, September 30, 2016 4:03 AM
To: w3c-wai-gl@w3.org
Subject: Re: Question: testing for non-unique id values SC 4.1.1

Andrew asked:
>  If I implement content using javascript to create a useful DOM tree, am I using markup?

That’s a good point, and I would hope the answer is yes otherwise there is a whole category of websites not covered. (Assuming we want any to be covered by 4.1.1, the answer should be yes.)

It doesn’t seem to be a stretch to count JavaScript created markup or DOM manipulation as part of “markup languages”.

I think there has been a trend in recent years for AT to use the accessibility APIs rather than do their own interpretation. Jaws was the obvious one that did its own interpretation but I think it is using the APIs now… Can anyone confirm? Are there others that do their own interpretation?

If the APIs are the official way to do things, the usefulness of 4.1.1 has reduced as anything the browsers don’t interpret should be apparent to everyone, not just people using AT.


> Also, what is “markup content”?  :)

You (probably) jest, but “markup” does appear to be an omission from the WCAG 2 glossary!

-Alastair