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Re: Text That Looks Like A Link

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From: glen walker
Date: Mar 16, 2023 11:12AM

Interesting. I'd never really considered "identifying" an element with
regards to 3.2.4 as being visual rather than as labeling (or the accessible
name), as Patrick pointed out. While the understanding section focuses on
the accessible name (whether a label or alt text), the actual guideline
does not specifically say that it's talking about the accessible name, only
that it's "identified" consistently.

2.5.3 Label in Name specifically says "name" (meaning accessible name) in
the guideline so if 3.2.4 really intended for the "identification" to be by
name, it seems like it would have said so. Now, 3.2.4 is WCAG 2.0 and
2.5.3 is WCAG 2.1 so perhaps things changed a bit between the two versions
and we learned to be a little more specific in the guideline wording.

Whatever the reason, I can see Verena's argument given the current
wording. Ideally, it shouldn't matter if this issue fails a specific
guideline or if it's just a bad UX. If you have underlined text that is
used for emphasis and similarly underlined text that is a link, it's a
problem that should be fixed. Having a WCAG failure behind it might give
it more "oomph" to get it fixed rather than "merely" a UX bug.

Back when I learned how to type, with a real typewriter and paper, pre- PC
and word processor days, I had to underline names of books or articles.
There wasn't an option for italics or different font families. Now that
computers have moved out of huge air conditioned rooms and into our
pockets, and we've all learned that underlining now means "link" instead of
"emphasis", I don't see any reason why underlining should be used for
anything but links. (Misspelled words in documents sort of use underlining
but it's typically a squiggly underline and not a straight underline.)
It's also interesting that the emphasis HTML element, <em>, defaults to
italic styling, not underlining. But I'm starting to digress from the
original topic.