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Re: Relationship between WCAG and the ARIA in HTMLspecification

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From: Steve Green
Date: Aug 7, 2023 10:20AM

It was embarrassing to have to report a <div> inside a <span> as a non-conformance of SC 4.1.1, but a <button> element inside an <a> element is another matter completely. It's clearly wrong and SC 4.1.1 made it easy to get things like that fixed.

However, in the absence of SC 4.1.1 it seems we have to prove there is an actual problem, which begs the question how do we do that? How many browser and assistive technology combinations do we need to test? We obviously can't test them all. Perhaps we should try to find some obscure combination that reliably fails, so we only need to test with that one.

It seems we're relying on user agent heuristics to provide a good user experience, but where does that leave us with respect to WCAG's "robustness" requirement? There is no way to be sure that future user agents will handle the invalid code nicely.

Steve