- From: Patrick H. Lauke <redux@splintered.co.uk>
- Date: Wed, 24 Mar 2021 00:01:57 +0000
- To: w3c-wai-ig@w3.org
On 23/03/2021 22:16, Guy Hickling wrote: > On the other hand there are, as you say, many situations where there is > good reason to add other things, but I think that reason must be in the > presentation, to comply with 1.3.1. There ought to be some justifiable > cause, in the visual presentation, for taking such action. (And I > personally think adding headings into unheaded content is not usually a > good example, as it is departing quite seriously from what is on the page.) Yet functionally the practice is no different from, say, adding an extra explicit aria-label to a landmark region. The end effect is the same - adding some more information than what is presented visually (at least directly), to make something more understandable for AT users only. Often done in a well-meaning way, often also done to excess leading to an overcompensation that makes things far too verbose. But 1.3.1 doesn't, in my mind, really cover this scenario too clearly. "Information, structure, and relationships conveyed through presentation can be programmatically determined or are available in text." It doesn't say "ONLY information, structure, and relationships conveyed through presentation". The normative wording is ambiguous on whether or not it's allowed to add further info/structure/relationships which may not be immediately conveyed through presentation. And we often do add more. But in the absence of unambiguous "yes you can" / "no you can't", we've kind of adopted a subjective view on when it's too much extra info or not (the same way it's really left to interpretation sometimes what the actual info that IS conveyed through presentation really encompasses). > Take most navigation menus. We see visually what they are immediately, > but to a blind person they would be just several random links. So we > give them structure and explanation by putting them in a list and a > <nav> element and give them a label. Sure, but then do we fail them if they just use a <nav> and no <ul> for instance? That's the nuance that often leads to debates. > So it seems to me it all comes down, in the end, to "cause" and > "justification" in the presentation. If a sighted person will understand > something from the visual presentation (layout, position, or possibly > even from the words themselves), there is likely to be cause under 1.3.1 > to make that clear to AT. Absolutely. It's the opposite situation though that can be tricky ... if content has richer structural semantics than what is actually being visually presented, is that a fail? Assuming that the richer semantics are indeed correct. I think that's what the OP is getting at here. And I'd say that the cut-off point is, vaguely, along the lines of: "it's ok if there's more semantics in the structure that are not visually apparent, UNLESS they contradict what the visual presentation suggests the info/structure/relationships are". Fluffy/vague, of course...but such is 1.3.1 (even reading it in its normative sense). IMO of course... P -- Patrick H. Lauke https://www.splintered.co.uk/ | https://github.com/patrickhlauke https://flickr.com/photos/redux/ | https://www.deviantart.com/redux twitter: @patrick_h_lauke | skype: patrick_h_lauke
Received on Wednesday, 24 March 2021 00:02:11 UTC