Report of the HTML4/CSS2 Accessibility Review


Last revised October 24. 1997

This web page provides a guide to materials supporting the WAI review of HTML4 and CSS2 recommendations nominated by the HC Working Group and reviewed by the WAI Interest Group.

Pointers to detailed proposals is included. The recommendations are summarized very tersely here, and decorated with a few links to influential source materials.

This page will be maintained to try to keep it within 24 hours of current with respect to current discussion during the period from October 15th to Nov 10th.

How to use this document

Monitor this document at  http://www.w3c.org/WAI/group/HC/report.html (corrected 24 Oct).

Where this document refers to messages in the email archives, please take advantage of the thread index to read related discussion before and after the cited message.

If discussing these proposals in the HTML or CSS working groups, please cross-post to w3c-wai-hc@w3.org as well.

Review of the issues

The five thread-starters have symbolic names to help keep the discussions straight. Please use these naming conventions in your replies to facilitate dialog on the list-serve. The threads are:

OPTION -- Making SELECT structures with lots of OPTIONs comprehensible.

Suggested WAI recommendations from HC Working Group:

TABLE -- Making TABLEs comprehensible.

Suggested WAI recommendations from HC Working Group:

DESC -- Text associated with images

Background -- for reference: variety of practices integrating image descriptions and image alternatives with images in hypertext literature. See the GL group area. Suggested WAI recommendations from HC Working Group:

REF -- Associating HTML contents with external resources.

Uses or requirements:

Suggested WAI recommendations from HC Working Group:


MEDIA -- Classifying user display and control

Introduction to the  MEDIA types issue.

Suggested WAI recommendations from HC Working Group:


Lesser issues

The following issues have been discussed in the HC group but appear to be straighforward or otherwise not meriting a lot of discussion in the brief time we have for Interest Group review.

Preserving the logical reading order of text.

 Example of problems as documented in the TRACE guidelines.

Suggested WAI recommendations from HC Working Group:

For background, search  The HC list archives for "order". Browse both quarters; the thread runs over.

Image used as list bullet

The issue has to do with text alternatives to list bullets defined by an image file.

Suggested WAI recommendations from HC Working Group:

Controlling dynamic features

Gregg Vanderheiden copied over  a good summary by Kelly Ford. For more background search the webwatch-l  digest archive for "dynamism".

Suggested WAI recommendations from HC Working Group:
Refer to Browser Guidelines and Markup Guidelines for further consideration.


CSS2 review

The CSS2 spec being still under development, we haven't reached the same level of reviewing in this area.

The HC message Regarding CSS2 summarizes our position.



Daniel Dardailler, Project Manager of the W3C Web Accessibility Initiative Working Group

Al Gilman, Chair of the WAI HTML4/CSS2 (HC) Review Working Group