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Re: Landmarks

for

From: John Foliot
Date: May 2, 2019 9:31AM

Steve writes:

> I struggle to see how this cannot be a non-compliance.

As Jon Avila notes, this was heavily debated at the W3C. SC 1.3.1 simply
states: *Information, structure, and relationships conveyed through
presentation can be programmatically determined or are available in text.*

Effectively, the argument goes like this: When WCAG 2.0 was published,
"landmarks" (whether ARIA or HTML5) were not really a thing that could be
reliably counted upon (ref: AT support), and so as such, you could still be
in WCAG 2.0 conformance without the use of landmarks, if other mechanisms
were provided to convey document structure (i.e. headings, etc.).
Interestingly, WebAIM's very first SR survey was conducted right around the
same time that WCAG 2.0 was published, and that initial survey concluded
that a majority of daily SR users were using Headings as a principle means
of content navigation - relying on the structure they afforded at that time
(and still do today): https://webaim.org/projects/screenreadersurvey/

It is important to also remember that WCAG conformance is not based upon
techniques, but rather outcomes, and so while using landmarks today is
pretty much a no-brainer (it is an extremely *effective* way of meeting the
requirement), failing to use landmarks cannot be a non-conformance outcome*
if document structure can be determined with other methods (including - and
many people miss this nuance - *"...or (is) available in text"*), which is
why a Failure Technique of that nature was rejected.

I'd also tend to agree with Birkir: if a site *does* use landmarks, I'd
expect to see at a minimum the "big 3" as well (Header/Main/Footer), but
again, I'd be hard pressed to fail a site if all they used were Header and
Footer, because failing to use any of the landmarks (ARIA or HTML5) is not,
in-and-of-itself, a failure. There is nothing in any W3C specification
(Recommendation) that explicitly states you have to use a minimum set, or
specific combination, of landmarks: it's bad development practice perhaps,
but not an explicit failure. (Bottom Line: using landmarks is a great Best
Practice, but that's it.)

(* there was also concern that if a Failure Technique like that was
written, sites/pages that did not use landmarks but were still WCAG
compliant at time of publishing would suddenly fall out of conformance,
which we had to avoid at all costs. Backward compatibility is and remains a
crucial concern, both on this specific topic, but also overall during the
WCAG 2.1 and now 2.2 development phases.)

HTH

JF


On Thu, May 2, 2019 at 8:59 AM Steve Green < <EMAIL REMOVED> >
wrote:

> The absence of landmarks is certainly not the most serious of
> accessibility barriers, but landmarks have the advantage that they convey
> both the start and end of sections of content, which headings do not.
>
> Page headers and footers are usually conveyed visually in a totally
> unambiguous manner. SC 1.3.1 requires that this structure is conveyed
> programmatically, and landmarks are the best way to do that. In fact, how
> else would you do so? I struggle to see how this cannot be a non-compliance.
>
> Steve
>
--
*John Foliot* | Principal Accessibility Strategist | W3C AC Representative
Deque Systems - Accessibility for Good
deque.com