Edit comment LC-2611 for Accessibility Guidelines Working Group

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Comment LC-2611: Comment Shortname:; Commenter: Detlev Fischer <detlev.fischer@testkreis.de>; Message-id:; Section of the document concerned:

or; Refinement of the section concerned:; Status:
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Commenter's response (URI):; Comment:
The test procedure of H48 just checks whether list markup is used on things that visually appear as list. This implies that the use of lists to tender horizontal menus (as mentioned in example 5 of H48) is not covered in the test. It seems navigation menus just using divs instead of list markup would pass 1.3.1.
The same might apply to things like popup menus that may not be perceived as lists (no bullets, no numbering), but the case is clearer for horizontal arrangements.

Proposed Change:
In terms of a11y it is important to have menus marked up as list. For evaluation purposes, it would be good to have a technique or failure that reflects that. The H48 test procedure might be amended to include a check of navigation menus (incl. horizontal ones) but this may easily become too prescriptive. Not sure...; Related issues: (space separated ids); WG Notes: (Previous proposal): Action: Do nothing Response: We agree that horizontal menus are not laid out to look like conventional lists, so the test procedure for h48 would not apply. But we don't think this is a problem. Links are generally easy to navigate through because they receive tab focus. Whether or not horizontal menus are marked up as lists is not the critical accessibility factor for a menu, although it has some advantages, and is certainly the prevailing convention on the web. We wouldn't want to fail navigation menus not laid out as a list. That is, as you say, too prescriptive. The important thing is tab focus. If the links do not receive focus (such as a poorly designed Javascript dropdown) they will fail 2.1.1 if each link does not receive keyboard focus, or if it cannot be navigated with a keyboard. If for some reason their layout order is important to understanding the content (which is unlikely), they would fail 2.4.3, focus order.; Resolution: Thank you for your comment. As you correctly pointed out, example 5 includes a reference to horizontal menus, and it is therefore made clear that horizontal menus are, in fact, included in this technique. Regarding the test procedure, we feel it is more appropriate to avoid mention of specific examples. Furthermore, we feel that a horizontal menu is visually presented as a list, since a connection between the menu items is implied by such a presentation, and that the test procedure does not exclude such a menu. Regarding drafting a failure, we do not feel that the lack of list markup as dictated by this technique would necessarily lead to a failure, as there might be other means of satisfying this success criterion, especially when dealing with navigation menus.; (Please make sure the resolution is adapted for public consumption)