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Re: List Headings

for

From: Jared Smith
Date: Jun 18, 2013 3:56PM

On Tue, Jun 18, 2013 at 3:02 PM, David Ashleydale wrote:

> It sounds like what you're saying is that if the text of a link isn't
> explicit enough on its own, we should be able to rely on the reading order
> for a user to be able to determine that a generic link in a list is related
> to the sentence, phrase or paragraph right before the list, and still
> conform to WCAG Level AA.

Precisely.

I suppose one could also use the <dl> element as defined in HTML5 to
provide an association:

<dl>
<dt>Spring 2012 Quarterly Report</dt>
<dd><a href="word1.html">Word</a></dd>
<dd><a href="pdfsumm1.html">PDF (Summary)</a></dd>
<dd><a href="pdffull1.html">PDF (Full)</a></dd>
</dl>

More details at http://html5doctor.com/the-dl-element/

A quick test in VoiceOver and NVDA showed that both read this as a
"list with 4 items", so there isn't really a good association between
the 'heading' and the list items anyway. In fact, because they are
grouped together this could be even worse than having the descriptor
text read separate from the list.

Again, I wouldn't worry about such things - they are adequately
accessible without adding additional markup and overhead.

Jared