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Thoughts on citing multiple WCAG criteria for one issue

for

From: glen walker
Date: Nov 17, 2019 3:05PM

When doing compliance testing, do you limit the criteria for an issue to
just one criterion so as not to overinflate the number of issues found on a
page?



For example, if there was a <label> next to an <input> but the two were not
programmatically associated (ie, no "for" attribute), would you cite both
4.1.2 and 1.3.1 as the problem? My preference in that case is to just use
4.1.2. But technically there is a visual relationship between the label
and input because they're adjacent to each other on the display but that
relationship cannot be programmatically determined, so it's a 1.3.1 too. But
the solution for both 4.1.2 and 1.3.1 is the same – to use the "for"
attribute.



As another example, if you have an image embedded in a link and the link
itself does not have any visual text and the image doesn't have alt text,
that could be both 1.1.1 and 2.4.4. For me, this is more difficult than
the previous example in trying to choose just one criterion. This could
again be fixed with one solution – specifying an alt on the image – but
that is not how I would fix it. I would recommend an empty alt on the
image to hide it, then specify an aria-label on the link. That way you
don't hear the word "graphic" when the link is announced. In general,
users don't care if a link is implemented as text or as an image. They
just want to know what the link is for. So I would probably report two
separate issues (1.1.1 and 2.4.4) with separate solutions rather than one
issue with two success criteria.



If the above two examples were the only issues on the page, would you
report two, three, or four issues?