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Re: To what degree does failure to convey structure violate 1.3.1 or other success criteria?

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From: Bourne, Sarah (MASSIT)
Date: Feb 12, 2018 1:48PM

Going back to Bob's original set of questions, what if you aren't really sure what structure is being conveyed by the presentation?

For example, I'm looking at the " Find Your Future Commonwealth Job" page on Mass.gov [1]. Two H2s, " What would you like to do?" and " What you need to know". Each of these has very attractive "tiles" with links to more specific information. Right now, these tiles have no semantic markup other than the A tag. You may have noticed that there is no "tile" tag in HTML. <smile> Visually, I would think they're most like paragraphs and should use the P tag. Functionally, I would think list mark-up would be more useful, for screen reader users anyway.

So, two questions here: Is this a violation of 1.3.1?, and What is the correct structural markup?

The next H2 (which looks different, by the way) is "Additional Resources" followed by text links (no tiles). Again, they are only marked up with DIVs. Surely they should be list items (even though they look more like paragraphs.) But is it a 1.3.1 failure that they aren't marked up as either a list or a paragraph? The last link takes you to another pages showing all additional resources [2] with the same problem.

Things like this are what make feel uncomfortable basing conformance just on what something looks like. If your H2s don't all look like each other, that doesn't necessarily mean they should be different heading levels. And designers are always going to come up with new designs, that may have things that don't look like the standard structural elements in HTML.3

[1] https://www.mass.gov/find-your-future-commonwealth-job
[2] https://www.mass.gov/find-your-future-commonwealth-job/resources
Sarah E. Bourne
Director of IT Accessibility
Executive Office of Technology Services and Security (EOTSS)
1 Ashburton Place, 8th Floor, Boston, MA 02108
Office: (617) 626-4502
<EMAIL REMOVED> | www.mass.gov/eotss