Re: 1.3.1 info and relationships

"For example, if text visually appears no different from the surrounding
text but has been spuriously marked up as a heading or table or within a
landmark implying it serves a semantic purpose that it does not, would this
also fail 1.3.1?"

Yes, it would. It's important to remember that semantic HTML is interpreted
in specific ways by assistive tech like screen readers. If a user is
navigating via screen reader and gets to a passage of text marked up with
heading tags, the screen reader will tell the user that it's a heading and
what level (1, 2, 3, etc.). Same with tables; screen readers will identify
the structure as a table and read off cells with the attendant information
(column number, row number, etc.). As a result, using semantic HTML for
styling, but not matching the use to the presentation of the content on the
page, will result in screen reader users getting information about the page
structure that is actually wrong. It will also mess up their navigation if
they're trying to skim the page by jumping from heading to heading since
they'll end up jumping to content that doesn't actually function as a
heading in terms of the real page organization.

As Brian noted in his response, 1.3.1 doesn't mark out this inverse problem
specifically, but like him, I and my auditing team will mark this kind of
misuse of semantic HTML as a 1.3.1 failure because of the way that it ends
up muddling the programmatic organization of the page. This is probably
something that we should work into the Accessibility Conformance Testing
(ACT) Rules <https://act-rules.github.io/rules/> if it's a failure that we
all agree on.

  --
Annie Heckel

Lead Accessibility Auditor
Online ADA <https://onlineada.com/>

On Tue, Mar 23, 2021 at 7:45 AM Ms J <ms.jflz.woop@gmail.com> wrote:

> Hello,
>
> Is 1.3.1 specifically focused on the visual presentation of the page or is
> it more focused on the semantics in the page?
>
> I can see that visual presentation is often an easy way to provide
> semantic context, but there are other ways that the semantics within the
> page may be incorrect.
>
> Specifically, the failure F43 which talks about ‘using structural markup
> in a way that does not represent relationships in the context’ specifies
> that it applies ‘when structural markup is used to achieve a presentational
> effect, but indicates relationships that do not exist in the content’
>
> So my question is, does this incorrect structural mark-up have to ‘achieve
> a presentational effect’ for this failure to apply? I would have thought it
> didn’t, but I wanted to confirm. Could that description be amended to: ‘when
> structural markup is used but indicates relationships that do not exist in
> the content’
>
> For example, if text visually appears no different from the surrounding
> text but has been spuriously marked up as a heading or table or within a
> landmark implying it serves a semantic purpose that it does not, would this
> also fail 1.3.1?
>
> Thanks
>
> Sarah
>
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