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Re: Empty <P> Tags For Spacing

for

From: Duff Johnson
Date: Feb 8, 2022 8:12AM

That's an interesting perspective.

Do blank lines (zero characters between <p> and </p>) actually constitute... “content”?

I agree - of course - that they aren't best-practice, but it's not obvious (at least to me) why they are relevant to accessibility such that its a WCAG failure to include them.

I would rather expect that the correct thing for AT to do is to ignore them in all cases. If one does not take this view then other nasty possibilities arise… such as authors using “dummy” empty h# elements to “help" with document structure… or using empty <tr> to somehow “separate” tables… and on and on. Yuck.

I'sll toss out a strawman: in order to be represented by AT a given structure element should contain, at minimum, a space character.

Duff.

> On Feb 8, 2022, at 09:51, Lars Ballieu Christensen < <EMAIL REMOVED> > wrote:
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> In my opinion, use of p-elements to achieve a certain visual presentation is a WCAG 2.1 violation (1.3.1); p-elements are intended to define paragraphs.. As blank lines are not semantically paragraphs, such use represents incorrect markup of content.
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> On 08/02/2022, 15.01, "WebAIM-Forum on behalf of Duff Johnson" < <EMAIL REMOVED> on behalf of <EMAIL REMOVED> > wrote:
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>> On Feb 8, 2022, at 01:05, Steve Green < <EMAIL REMOVED> > wrote:
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>> I'm not convinced it's a WCAG non-conformance, and I'm not sure it's even a nuisance. Does it have any impact on anyone?
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> …and even if it does have an impact it seems like a AT problem, not a file-format issue.
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>> Empty <P> tags are a big problem in PDFs, though. They cause JAWS (and possibly other screen readers) to say "blank", which we regard as a user experience issue, not a WCAG non-conformance.
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> IMO, this is a description of what screen-readers are choosing to do… and they should choose otherwise. That a PDF might include an empty <P> does not force AT to present it.
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>> More importantly, if they occur in lists, they break the list structure, which definitely is a WCAG non-conformance. We see this a lot in PDFs created in Word and PowerPoint.
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> Yes; people use paragraphs within lists. It is for this reason that PDF 2.0 includes the concept of a “Continued list” to provide support for this very common use-case.
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> Duff.
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