- From: David Woolley <forums@david-woolley.me.uk>
- Date: Wed, 11 Oct 2017 12:14:58 +0100
- To: w3c-wai-ig@w3.org
On 11/10/17 09:58, Brian Bors wrote: > > Chaals McCathie mentioned "I believe the purpose was to support > navigation through "strict hierarchy", and by search. In a public web > site that can be indexed by a search engine this is trivial." and > Jonathan Avila answers "So it sounds like SC 2.4.5 can be met by using > external search engines" > > Which suggests that all public websites automatically comply to SC 2.4.5 > (unless they stop crawlers) simply because external non-embedded search > engines exist (for example: google), but I don't think this is the case > as we cannot be sure that these external search engine comply with WCAG. Whilst search engine access may have been ruled out by the same logic as javascript disabled access, site maps are important to search engines because crawlers won't generally try completing forms to navigate a site and I'm not sure that they can cope with general javascript (they will need an arbitrary cutoff, anyway, because of the Turing "halting problem"). Site maps certainly increase usability. I would argue that at least some of the resulting usability failings are also accessibility failings, under current definitions, because they discriminate against those with cognitive disabilities (although I more generally don't like the idea that a site can be classed accessible if it is equally unusable to everyone!).
Received on Wednesday, 11 October 2017 11:16:08 UTC