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Re: Landmarks

for

From: Isabel Holdsworth
Date: May 3, 2019 5:07AM

Thanks John and everyone for weighing in on thiss topic. I felt this
was probably how things stood: that although it's sloppy mark-up, it's
not a technical fail.

Cheers and have a great weekend, Isabel

On 02/05/2019, John Foliot < <EMAIL REMOVED> > wrote:
> 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
> > > > >