WebAIM - Web Accessibility In Mind

E-mail List Archives

Re: Accessible P Tag Usage

for

From: Patrick H. Lauke
Date: Mar 19, 2019 6:18PM

On 19/03/2019 23:47, Jonathan Avila wrote:
[...]
> 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"

Just on the topic of headings though, "programmatically determined"
means, in essence, in a machine-readable unambiguous way. How would you
communicate that something's a heading this way? If you mean just adding
something like "Heading: ..." in the text, then you're really relying on
heuristics in software to pick up on any variation (in any human
language) and make a guess that you meant that to signify that it's a
heading. So...probably not a good example of providing programmatically
determined info.

However, for "paragraphs" the concept is a lot more handwavy
(particularly, as noted elsewhere in the thread, even an image can be
wrapped in a <p> and is deemed ok). Taking the concept of paragraph to
mean, very generally, a chunk of content that "goes together", then
surely any wrapper element (a <p>, a <div>, an <aside>, etc) would be
appropriate, though.

[...]

> 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.
Agreed. It's a waste of effort and resources - even the lengthy
discussion around this, though necessary, feels like a lot of effort
when at the same time there's so many more important and fundamental
aspects that cause real barriers.

P
--
Patrick H. Lauke

www.splintered.co.uk | https://github.com/patrickhlauke
http://flickr.com/photos/redux/ | http://redux.deviantart.com
twitter: @patrick_h_lauke | skype: patrick_h_lauke