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Re: Accessible P Tag Usage

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From: Jonathan Avila
Date: Mar 19, 2019 5:47PM

> [Bevi wrote] all content must be tagged with a semantically appropriate tag"

Regarding WCAG -- could you point to a success criteria that states that? SC 1.3.1 Information and relationship says
"Information, structure, and relationships conveyed through presentation can be programmatically determined or are available in text. "

The key is "are programmatically determined or are available as text". In theory I could communicate that something was a heading through text and still meet the requirement. Similarly, I could communicate sections of page via heading elements and not landmarks or communicate the selected state of something via text "selected" before the days of ARIA this was common.

Programmatically determined is defined as "determined by software from author-supplied data provided in a way that different user agents, including assistive technologies, can extract and present this information to users in different modalities"

Information about sentences and paragraphs in many languages can be determined by punctuation, sentences that are not separated by a blank line, etc. These elements are programmatically determinable by today's and yesterday's assistive technology.

Requiring all paragraphs to be in a p element and forbidding empty p elements would add no value to users assistive technology and divert efforts away from fixing items that are true barriers and delay accessible to people with disabilities.

Jonathan Avila, CPWA