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Thread: WCAG2 and text styling

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From: Rick Hill
Date: Thu, Jul 28 2011 10:45AM
Subject: WCAG2 and text styling
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I use TotalValidtor as one of my Web diagnostic tools. One accessibility error it reports is the use of and and :

[WCAG v2 1.3.1 (A)] Use CSS for presentation effects, use or for emphasis

Agree this is a violation of the WCAG 2 guidelines?
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Rick Hill, Web CMS Administrator
University Communications, UC Davis

From: Jared Smith
Date: Thu, Jul 28 2011 11:06AM
Subject: Re: WCAG2 and text styling
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On Thu, Jul 28, 2011 at 10:42 AM, Rick Hill < = EMAIL ADDRESS REMOVED = > wrote:
> I use TotalValidtor as one of my Web diagnostic tools. One accessibility error it reports is the use of and and :
>
> [WCAG v2 1.3.1 (A)] Use CSS for presentation effects, use or for emphasis
>
> Agree this is a violation of the WCAG 2 guidelines?

It certainly is not a failure to use , , or instead of CSS
for presentational effects. These markup elements are no more or less
presentational than CSS is. There is no impact on accessibility here.

Often , , or are used to present semantic (e.g., important)
information. This would not be correct usage. However, there is no
WCAG 2.0 failure defined for this case, though it is recommended to
use and instead of and where appropriate. I
don't believe that failing to do this is a WCAG failure, especially
when you consider that no screen reader I am aware of treats this
markup appropriately - either they ignore them altogether or treat
/ and / exactly the same.

Jared Smith
WebAIM

From: Jukka K. Korpela
Date: Thu, Jul 28 2011 11:15AM
Subject: Re: WCAG2 and text styling
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28.07.2011 19:42, Rick Hill wrote:

> I use TotalValidtor as one of my Web diagnostic tools.
> One accessibility error it reports is the use of and and :
>
> [WCAG v2 1.3.1 (A)] Use CSS for presentation effects, use or for emphasis
>
> Agree this is a violation of the WCAG 2 guidelines?

Guideline 1.3.1 says: "Information, structure, and relationships
conveyed through presentation can be programmatically determined or are
available in text." In its abstractness, it is relatively useless, and
taken at face value, it requires markup that just doesn't exist in HTML.

And on the other hand, it does not in any way prohibit the use of markup
for presentational purposes. It doesn't even discuss such issues. The
message from TotalValidator seems to be based on different thinking, but
that's their view, not part of WCAG rules.

To make things more complex, the HTML5 drafts (which seem to become the
de facto HTML standard, more or less) redefines , , and as
semantic markup (a bad move if you ask me) as well as the meanings of
 and .

In any case, this is nitpicking at most, as long as you are using proper
heading markup. Within text, using or versus some "semantic"
markup isn't a big issue. Using , or any underlining of texts other
than links, _is_ an issue, but this does not depend on the methods used
for underlining.

--
Yucca, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/