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Re: Well formed verses Valid code

for

From: Alastair Campbell
Date: Feb 26, 2007 2:40AM

> On 2/24/07, <EMAIL REMOVED> wrote:
>
> "I feel that a DTD is important and cleaning-up codes to comply with
> the DTD is a first step, to accessiblity."

You will certainly need one to make it easy to check the pages. If they
are using .Net there is no reason they can't use a standard doctype.
Just make sure they choose HTML 4.01 or XHTML 1, not XHTML 1.1 (which
.Net thinks it supports).

Derek Featherstone wrote:
> "If ever you find errors in validation that cause issues with speech
> technology such as screen readers, please please please publish the
> details."

It's fairly rare because they tend to cause browser issues first, but
depending on the browser I do come across things occasionally:
http://alastairc.ac/2006/06/invalid-html-interfering-with-accessibility/

I'm convinced that well-formed (X)HTML should be an accessibility (as
well as good practice) requirement, which is why I can understand why
WCAG 2 went with that phrase about pages being "parsed unambiguously",
but does anyone know if things like un-encoded ampersands could cause an
accessibility issue?

I tend to let encoding issues past (in HTML), just noting it should be
improved to ease the QA process.

Kind regards,

-Alastair

--
Alastair Campbell | Director of User Experience

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