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From: Despain, Dallas
Date: Aug 25, 2009 6:00PM


Hi,
Section 1194.22 (d) Of the section508 guidelines say that
"Documents shall be organized so they are readable without requiring an associated style sheet."

I thought that the spirit of this law is to make sure that the reading order is correct regardless of stylesheet? Our QA department is taking it literally and testing functionality of our pages with css off (using the "disable styles" function of the wave toolbar)

This is causing problems because
We are using web2.0 style dialogs in our application similar to these:
http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/examples/container/container-ariaplugin_clean.html

JAWS respects and doesn't announce things with display:none applied, which I think is pretty much essential to designing web 2.0 pages.

When you turn styles off in that page, it's hard to navigate because the dialog content shows up inline with the rest of the content and it's hard to tell where the dialogs begin and where they end.

What do you guys think? Is it reasonable to expect these types of dialog to work and make sense with css off? I didn't see an equivalent wcag2.0 "css off" requirement except perhaps it can be implied form 1.3.2 Meaningful Sequence, and 2.4.3 focus order.

Is this Section 1194.22 (d) an outdated guideline?

Thanks,

Dallas