RE: WCAG versus Bobby for site review?

Comments Re: CynthiaSays and Your Question:


The page being discussed is: http://www.cookiecrook.com/weblog.php


For the question......

> 1. "Separate adjacent links with more than whitespace." is flagged 
> with adjacent anchor tags even if they are not both links. I believe 
> this is a Bobby bug and not an accessibility problem. Would you agree?

Cynthia Says looks for anchor elements that contain an HREF attribute in
them, and then makes sure that there is another character between it and the
next link where the next link also contains an href attribute.
Cynthia Says does not detect a failure on this page for this checkpoint
because you do not have two adjacent anchor tags with href attributes not
separated by a character.  Bobby is detecting the anchor with an "href" next
to an anchor with an "id" attribute as a failure, and it is not a failure,
because the anchor with the "id" attribute only is not a link.

The WCAG checkpoint [1] this is referring to is:
10.5 Until user agents (including assistive technologies) render adjacent
links distinctly, include non-link, printable characters (surrounded by
spaces) between adjacent links. [Priority 3]

The technique that the WCAG guidelines provide to assist in addressing this
issue [2] refers to grouped links, such as navigation bars.


For the question......
> 2. "Do not use the same link phrase more than once when the links 
> point to different URLs." refers to WCAG Section 13.1 Priority 2 which

> states "Clearly identify the target of each link." This is the one I 
> am unsure about. I have permanent links to each of my web log posts 
> where the link text is consistently "#" but each anchor has a unique 
> title attribute of "permanent link to post <number>". Would this 
> suffice for "clearly identifying the target"? Arguably, I could pick 
> some link text that would be moer clear, like "link", but doesn't the 
> unique title suffice the requirement for WCAG?

The technique that the WCAG guidelines provide to assist in addressing this
issue [3] refers to using the title attribute in addition to "clear" link
text.  Cynthia Says does not flag these links as errors because of the
distinct title attribute value, however, it does present a warning for each
of these links because the link text, itself, is identical and should be
looked at to see if it could be made clearer.
The warning does not cause the Cynthia Says report to fail.


[1] http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG10-TECHS/#tech-divide-links
[2] http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG10-HTML-TECHS/#group-bypass
[3] http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG10-HTML-TECHS/#link-text

Regards,

Rob Yonaitis
HiSoftware - http://www.hisoftware.com/co/yonaitis.htm

Commonwealth of Kentucky Governor's Office for Technology Selects HiSoftware
Content Quality and Accessibility Solutions
http://www.hisoftware.com/press/KY.html

Received on Thursday, 1 May 2003 10:23:32 UTC