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Re: Preceding headings and link context [wasWCAG 2.0: multiple buttons with the same name accessible]

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From: Andrew Kirkpatrick
Date: Nov 20, 2014 2:42PM

Jason,

The following is my belief of how the situation can be viewed but doesn't represent an official WCAG working group statement.

The understanding and techniques documents don't prohibit using the preceding heading at all - they don't "prohibit" anything. As you indicate, the techniques and understanding documents are non-normative, so if you are required to conform to WCAG 2.0 AA you don't have to do anything specific mentioned in the techniques document as only the standard and its success criteria are normative.

So, what does that mean? You could make an argument that by providing a custom attribute with more information for a link with poor link text that you are enabling programmatic determinability. And you'd be right that assistive technologies can get to the information, but then the question of accessibility support kicks in - the information needs to be programmatically available AND there needs to be user agent support so people can actually use what you create. In the case of the prior heading there is some assistive technology support, and since the providers are determining what browsers and AT are part of their conformance claims, it is possible that a provider might say "you need to use IE or FF with JAWS" as part of that claim.

What the techniques do for authors is provide a set of ways that they can meet the success criteria. There are many techniques that the group hasn't published, so the techniques don't describe the only way to meet the success criteria, but what they do provide is a way to meet a given SC in a way that allows the author to say "the WCAG group indicates that in their opinion this works". If an author wants to do something that the group hasn't published as a technique, or that the group feels is less than ideal, he still can but will need to provide more of the information that provides backing to the idea that the technique used meets the success criteria.

Does this help?
AWK