SVG Tiny 1.2 - 20060810 – 20080912

F Accessibility Support

Contents

This appendix is informative.

F.1 WAI Accessibility Guidelines accessibility guidelines

This appendix explains how accessibility guidelines published by W3C's Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) apply to SVG.

  1. The "Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0" [ WCAG ] and "Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0" [ WCAG2 ] explain how authors can create Web content that is accessible to people with disabilities.
  2. The "Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines 1.0" [ ATAG ] explains how developers can design accessible authoring tools such as SVG authoring tools. To conform to the SVG specification , an SVG authoring tool must conform to ATAG (priority 1). SVG support for element grouping , reuse and navigation is relevant to designing accessible SVG authoring tools.
  3. The "User Agent Accessibility Guidelines 1.0" [ UAAG ] explains how developers can design accessible user agents such as SVG-enabled browsers. To conform to the SVG specification , an SVG user agent must conform to to the Priority 1 accessibility guidelines defined in[ UAAG ] , and should conform also to Priorities 2 and 3.UAAG. SVG support for scaling, the DOM, and metadata are all relevant to designing accessible SVG user agents.

The W3C Note "Accessibility Features of SVG" [ SVG-ACCESS ] explains in detail how the requirements of the three guidelines apply to SVG.

F.2 SVG Content Accessibility Guidelines content accessibility guidelines

This section explains briefly how authors can create accessible SVG documents; it summarizes and builds upon "Accessibility Features of SVG" [ SVG-ACCESS ].

Provide text equivalents for graphics.
  • When the text content of a graphic (e.g., in a text content element ) explains its function, no text equivalent is required. Use the 'title' child element to explain the function of text content elements whose meaning is not clear from their text content.
  • When a graphic does not include explanatory text content, it requires a text equivalent. If the equivalent is complex, use the 'desc' element, otherwise use the 'title' child element.
  • If a graphic is built from meaningful parts, build the description from meaningful parts.
Do not rely on color alone.
  • Do not use color alone to convey semantic information.
  • Ensure adequate color contrast.
Use markup correctly.
  • Separate structure from presentation.
  • Use the 'g' element and rich descriptions to structure SVG documents. Reuse named objects.
  • Publish highly-structured documents, not just graphical representations. Documents that are rich in structure may be rendered graphically, as speech, or as Braille. For example, express mathematical relationships in MathML [ MATHML ] and use SVG for explanatory graphics.
  • Author documents that validate to the SVG RelaxNG grammar.
Use text for text, and graphics for graphics
  • Represent text as character data, not as glyphs, images or curves.
  • Style text with fonts. Authors may describe their own fonts in SVG.
  • Do not use 'pi' fonts or picture fonts to represent small graphics. The resulting garbage text does not conform to [ CHARMOD ] and confuses text to speech engines.
Provide a default reading order
  • Use 'textArea' elements to provide text that wraps in a box, rather than using script to wrap the text or using a sequence of unrelated 'text' elements.
Clarify natural language usage.
  • Use xml:lang 'xml:lang' to identify the natural language of content and changes in natural language. This ensures that textual content can be spell-checked, or converted to speech.
  • Use the 'systemLanguage' test conditional processing attribute to provide language-specific alternative text and/or graphics.
Allow for rich navigation Do not assume that all devices have a pointer device. Allow for keyboard navigation as well. Provide links for 8-way directional navigation. Ensure that dynamic content is accessible. Ensure that text equivalents for dynamic content are updated when the dynamic content changes. Avoid storing dynamic text in ecmascript arrays or in XSLT stylesheets. This makes it less accessible