WCAG2 Accessibility Techniques For HTML

Status

This document is a super extra rough draft and is meant to spark discussion.

Background

The requirements document for these techniques state:

The following points are mandatory requirements for Techniques.

Techniques related to Success Criteria must be testable. Guidance about testing methods may be provided.
Positive test cases must be provided for testable Techniques. Negative test cases should be provided when possible.
Techniques related to Additional Ideas should be testable when possible but may be not reliably testable. There must be a declaration of the testability of the Technique.
Example implementations or descriptions of implementations should be provided for untestable Techniques where possible.
Techniques should include descriptions, commentary, implementation notes, links to resources or training materials, etc. to contain information not part of the structured data.

WCAG 2 Checkpoint 3.1:

You will have successfully met Checkpoint 3.1 at the Minimum Level if the following minimum structure elements are present.:

titles on major sections of long documents
paragraphs

You will have successfully met Checkpoint 3.1 at Level 2 if:

the content has been reviewed, taking into account the additional ideas listed below, and is believed to contain as much structure as is possible and appropriate

You will have successfully met Checkpoint 3.1 at Level 3 if:

information is provided that would allow an assistive technology to determine at least one logical, linear reading order
diagrams are constructed in a fashion so that they have structure that can be accessed by the user.

Questions

What is a major section and what is a long document?
Can valid long documents be devoid of paragraphs?

Techniques for Checkpoint 3.1

Techniques for Minimum Level

Technique 13.2.1 [priority 2] Check for META, ADDRESS, TITLE and LINK elements.
Technique 3.5.1 [priority 2] Check document for header nesting
Technique 3.5.2 [priority 2] Check document for missing header markup
Technique 3.5.3 [priority 2] Verify that header elements are not used for formatting.
Technique 12.1.1 [priority 1] Check FRAME elements for valid "title" attributes
Technique 5.5.1 [priority 3] Check TABLE elements for valid "summary" attribute
Technique 5.5.2 [priority 2] Check TABLE elements for valid CAPTION element.

Techniques for Level 2

Technique 3.6.1 [priority 2] Check that list elements are within a list container and well nested.
Technique 5.1.1 Determine the purpose of the table
Technique 5.1.2 [priority 1] Check data table for row and column headers
Technique 5.2.1 - [Priority 1] Check data tables for multiple levels of row and column headers
Technique 5.4.1 [priority 2] Check layout tables for structural markup
Technique 5.6.1 [priority 3] Check table for header abbreviations
Technique 6.3.1 [priority 1] Verify that the page is usable when programmatic objects are disabled.
Technique 7.4.A [priority 2] Remove auto-refresh attributes from META elements
Technique 7.5.1 [priority 2] Check auto-redirect attributes on META elements
Technique 9.4.1 [priority 3] Check for "tabindex" attribute
Technique 9.5.1 [priority 3] Check for "accesskey" attribute.
Technique 10.1.1 [priority 1] Check A and AREA elements for valid "target" attributes (spawned windows without warning)
Technique 10.1.2 [priority 1] Verify that scripts do not spawn new windows.
Technique 10.2.1 [priority 2] Verify that LABEL elements are properly positioned.
Technique 10.5.1 [priority 3] Check for non-whitespace characters between consecutive A elements.
Technique 12.4.1 [priority 2] Check LABEL elements for valid "for" attribute values.
Technique 13.1.1 [priority 2] Verify that the target of each link is clearly identified.
Checkpoint 13.3 - Provide information about the general layout of a site @@Machine checkable? Generate user notification?
Checkpoint 13.4 - Use navigation mechanisms in a consistent manner @@Machine checkable? Generate user notification?
Checkpoint 13.5 - Provide navigation bars to highlight and give access to the navigation mechanism @@Machine checkable? Generate user notification?
Technique 13.6.1 [Priority 3] Verify if links should be grouped.
Checkpoint 13.8 - Place distinguishing information at the beginning of headings, paragraphs, lists, etc @@Machine checkable? Generate user notification?
Technique 13.9.1 [priority 3] Verify that information about document collections is provided.
Technique 13.10.1 [priority 3] Verify that one can skip over multi-line ASCII art.

Techniques for Level 3

Technique 5.3.1 [priority 2] Verify that layout tables make sense when linearized
Technique 10.3.1 [priority 3] Verify that a linearized version of tables used for layout is provided.

(Diagrams must be in SVG?)

Chris Ridpath ([email protected]) Feb. 27, 2003