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Re: WCAG and role="presentation"

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From: Jonathan Avila
Date: Aug 23, 2017 8:25AM

> Let's also keep in mind that using role="presentation" is easy.

While I think we'd all agree that it is best to use role presentation -- the question is whether it is a violation of WCAG. If table markup is not used with TH, scope or other header association markup then the table is not identifying header cells and it can be programmatically determined that the table is a layout table. Since WCAG 2 was written without relying on ARIA and was written before the ARIA spec was finalized -- the supporting document seem to indicate that it's not a failure of WCAG as long as not using role presentation is accessibility supported. However we don't have specific guidance on this and others are likely to disagree.

Ideally these are the types of things that need to be clearly defined in supporting documents so we can achieve consistency with testing tools and with conformance evaluations. Questions such as this can be raised with the Accessibility Guidelines Working Group on Github (https://github.com/w3c/wcag/issues). If you feel strongly about something it might be helpful to put together a suggested failure technique -- although getting failure techniques accepted has been proven difficult.

Jonathan

Jonathan Avila
Chief Accessibility Officer
Level Access, inc. (formerly SSB BART Group, inc.)
(703) 637-8957
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