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Re: Nu HTML Checker

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From: Steve Green
Date: Aug 9, 2021 1:56AM

The short answer is yes, you can ignore those validation errors. The long answer is...

WCAG2.1 SC 4.1.1 only requires you to report certain types of validation error. You should use a bookmarklet to filter the results so you only see the relevant ones. But which bookmarklet should you use?

Some of my team use https://github.com/stevefaulkner/wcagparsing. However, I recently reported an issue whereby I believe it is not filtering out all the validation errors I think it should.

Personally, I use https://dotjay.github.io/wcag-parsing-filter/bookmarklet/. This is based on Steve Faulkner's bookmarklet, but it filters out the validation errors mentioned above.

That said, I raised a couple of queries with regard to the latter more than a year ago, whereby I believe some results are filtered out incorrectly and some are not filtered out when they should be. I have not yet had an answer. Those queries would also apply to Steve Faulkner's bookmarklet.

The bottom line is that there is not a definitively correct filtering algorithm (that I am aware of). Furthermore, all such bookmarklets are fragile because they work by detecting specific strings in the validator's output. If the developers of the validator change even one character in a string, the bookmarklets will stop working correctly to some degree. Worse still, they will fail silently.

Steve Green
Managing Director
Test Partners Ltd