Re: 4.1.1 Parsing in WCAG 2.0 and 2.1

Hi everyone,

(John, I think you’ve missed some of the previous conversations / decisions, the WCAG 2.2 aspect was agreed in Jan:
https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/w3c-wai-gl/2023JanMar/0097.html)

Based on the previous discussions, the crux of the question is:
Should people be required to report on 4.1.1 in WCAG 2.0 & 2.1?

For WCAG 2.2 we decided “no”, no reporting on 4.1.1 would be required. Therefore, the most effective way of showing that was to remove the SC text and replace it with a note of explanation.
Deprecation (the term and the concept) was considered, but confusing as to whether it was required or not.

We all know that, in practice, the well-formedness aspects are dealt with by browsers and things like duplicate IDs, when harmful, will be caught under 1.3.1/4.1.2.

However, if reporting on it is still required, the testing to fill in the report will still be needed, so we won’t have achieved very much (except in 2.2).

We could potentially retain the normative text, but heavily hint that 4.1.1 is not recommended anymore.

So I can see two levels of note for 2.0/2.1, in concept:


  1.  Say it is removed from a later version, it is not recommended but still required for conformance claims, or
  2.  Say it is removed from a later version, it is 'obsolete' and can be disregarded.

I think Gregg’s version of (2) is the clearest so far.

Mary Jo – We have reached out to people from some of those organisations, I read out some correspondence from one in the last meeting. The gist of it was: If the regs have copied WCAG it won’t make any difference, if they link through to the default version people will have one less thing to do. There was no sense of panic.

Also, generally there is no one person at these organisations who can answer a question like this. A bit like asking an AGWG participant what we would think. If they don’t have active work now, there may not be a chair equivalent role to organise a group opinion. The best we will get is individuals’ opinions.

Kind regards,

Alastair

PS. Gregg’s version was:
NOTE: This SC should be considered as automatically met for any content using HTML.  Modern browsers all have automatic error correction for parsing errors, and issues such as incorrect states or names due to a duplicate ID, or missing roles due to inappropriately nested elements are covered by different success criteria.   This SC can therefore be ignored as being redundant.  It no longer provides any benefit to people with disabilities and should not be enforced or required for accessibility.