Re: PDFs and WCAG 2.4.5

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