RE: Breadcrumb text links - are they intended for 2.5.8 ?

We have been discussing this success criterion internally and with some testing tool vendors during the last week, and there are a lot of difficulties with it. Several important terms don't have definitions, so clarity is not likely to be forthcoming any time soon.

To illustrate the problem, I created a couple of test pages with 9 trivial examples of links and buttons that should fail the success criterion. Apart from the tools that did not report any non-conformances at all, no two tools reported the same number. Even the "best" tool reported fewer than half.

You are asking if the breadcrumb links and the final non-link text should be regarded as sentences, in which case the "Inline" exception applies. The success criterion does not provide a definition for a "sentence".

The relevant definition in the Oxford English Dictionary is "a set of words that is complete in itself, typically containing a subject and predicate, conveying a statement, question, exclamation, or command, and consisting of a main clause and sometimes one or more subordinate clauses."

The contents of the breadcrumb clearly do not meet this definition, so in the absence of anything to the contrary in WCAG, that's what I would go with. Furthermore, I would not say that the links are "constrained by the line-height of non-target text" because they are in separate elements that can be styled independently of the non-link text.

Steve Green
Managing Director
Test Partners Ltd


From: Leighton, Chris <Christopher.Leighton@team.telstra.com>
Sent: Tuesday, December 19, 2023 7:38 AM
To: w3c-wai-ig@w3.org
Subject: Breadcrumb text links - are they intended for 2.5.8 ?

Hello everyone,

asking if it is intended that text breadcrumbs are in-scope for the 2.2s criterion 2.5.8 ?

A scenario we are discussing is:

A labelled breadcrumb made using 5 list items in an unordered link-list, each link is visually separated by a chevron that is hidden to accessibility technologies. The list may be presented horizontally in left to right languages on a desktop and they may reflow into a stacked and wrapping presentation with zoom, narrow viewports of if any link names are long.

In asking this we're thinking about:

Understanding Success Criterion 2.5.8: Target Size (Minimum) | WAI | W3C<https://www.w3.org/WAI/WCAG22/Understanding/target-size-minimum.html> and its exception "Inline: The target is in a sentence or its size is otherwise constrained by the line-height of non-target text;"

Would your response be different if the last of the list items was not a link but only text?

Thank you in advance and all the best, Chris.



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