Use markup rather than images |
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WAI / WCAG 1.0 Priority 2 checkpoint 3.1 |
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Issue Description
The page contains images that might contain information
that is not appropriately marked up in HTML.
For example, MathML may be used to mark up mathematical equations, and
style sheets to format text and control
layout.
It is best to avoid using images to represent text. A better choice would be to use text and style sheets.
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How to check
If the image contains
- text that is rendered graphically in a fancy font, use the CSS
properties for fonts to achieve a similar effect;
-
a mathematical formula, then use MathML to encode it; see the W3C page on MathML
[http://www.w3.org/Math/]
.
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Issue Explanation
The W3C states (http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG10-CORE-TECHS/#structure
[http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG10-CORE-TECHS/#structure]
):
When designing a document or series of documents, content
developers should strive first to identify the desired structure for
their documents before evaluating how the documents will be
presented to the user. Distinguishing the structure of a document from
how the content is presented offers a number of advantages, including
improved accessibility, manageability, and portability.
Identifying what is structure and what is presentation may be
challenging at times. For instance, many content developers consider
that a horizontal line communicates a structural division. This may be
true for sighted users, but to unsighted users or users without
graphical browsers, a horizontal line may have next to no meaning. For
example, in HTML content developers should use the HTML 4.01 heading
elements (H1-H6) to identify new sections. These may be
complemented by visual cues or other means such as horizontal
rules, but should not be replaced by them.
The opposite holds true as well. Content developers should not use
structural elements to achieve presentation effects. For instance in
HTML, even though the BLOCKQUOTE element may cause indented text in
some browsers, it is designed to identify a quotation, not to create a
presentation side-effect. BLOCKQUOTE elements used for indentation
confuse users and search robots alike, who expect the element to be
used to mark up block quotations.
To determine if content is structural or presentational, create an
outline of the document. Each point in the hierarchy denotes a
structural change. Use structural markup to mark these changes and
presentational markup to make them more apparent visually and
aurally. Notice that horizontal rules will not appear in this outline
and therefore are not structural, but
presentational. Note: This quick test addresses
chapter, section, and paragraph structure. To determine structure
within phrases, look for abbreviations, changes in natural language,
definitions, and list items.
In another document (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0
[http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG10/]
) it says:
Guideline 3. Use markup and style sheets and do so properly.
Mark up documents with the proper structural elements. Control
presentation with style sheets rather than with presentation elements
and attributes.
Using markup improperly (not according to specification) hinders
accessibility. Misusing markup for a presentation effect (e.g., using
a table for layout or a header to change the font size) makes it
difficult for users with specialized software to understand the
organization of the page or to navigate through it. Furthermore, using
presentation markup rather than structural markup to convey structure
(e.g., constructing what looks like a table of data with an HTML PRE
element) makes it difficult to render a page intelligibly to other
devices [...] .
Content developers may be tempted to use (or misuse) constructs that
achieve a desired formatting effect on older browsers. These practices cause accessibility problems. It is best to consider
whether the formatting effect is critical enough to warrant
making the document inaccessible to some users.
At the other extreme, content developers must not sacrifice
appropriate markup because a certain browser or assistive technology
does not process it correctly. For example, it is appropriate to use
the TABLE element in HTML to mark up tabular information even though
some older screen readers may not handle side-by-side text correctly
(refer to checkpoint 10.3). Using TABLE correctly and creating tables
that transform easily (refer to guideline 5) makes it possible for
software to render tables in a way other than as two-dimensional grids.
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