[theme-reviewers] w3c validation and html5 in core

[esmi at quirm dot net]

on 05/04/2011 16:51 Mike Little said the following:

> You should consider Accessibility, which is a legal requirement for a lot of
> sites in a number of countries. Alternative browsing technologies,
> especially screen readers, work best with valid semantic HTML, whatever
> flavour.

First, I need to point out that I'm usually in the very front of any 
group that's lobbying for web accessibility issues. So what I'm about to 
say may seem out of character...

I think any kind of accessibility assessment is well beyond the remit of 
a Theme Review Team. Not only would it almost double their workload but 
it could be argued that some level of experience in this area would be 
needed before a reviewer could carry out any assessment. Otherwise 
there's a very real risk of doing more damage than good.

Secondly, unlike markup and CSS, web accessibility far more interwoven 
with the content and far more subjective. Validation is binary. 
Accessibility never is.

Finally, a theme is just a framework. It's what the end user does with 
that determines the overall accessibility of the site. So, even in the 
UK, where there is a legal accessibility requirement, the responsibility 
lies with the site owner - not the developer or the platform they use. 
And quite rightly so.

WP is pretty darn accessible out of the box (although there is definite 
room for improvement) but you only have to see 
<http://csszengarden.com/?cssfile=http://www.brucelawson.co.uk/zen/sample.css> 
to see just what an awful mess you can make out of accessible framework.

FWIW, I did have a short chat with Joseph(?) on exactly this subject 
about 18 months ago but we quickly came to the conclusion that 
implementing any kind of accessibility assessment or tag was just too 
impractical and had little or no potential benefits.

> Please don't think it is only about visual appearance.
> Another issue is that JavaScript is much more likely to fail with an invalid
> DOM.

You're playing my tune but I still think it's beyond a theme review. 
Heck - WCAG 2 even allows you to have js-only content these days. No 
graceful degradation. Nothing - providing the js dependability is part 
of your WCAG site documentation. If there's js in the theme and it falls 
over badly, I assume the theme will get kicked back as "broken", yes?

> So whilst strict HTML or XHTML validation is almost certainly out of scope
> for the theme review team.  It would be good for them to be aware that
> invalid markup can make a site impossible to use for  users with access
> difficulties. And per your example form elements are often a particular
> issue.

<http://make.wordpress.org/accessibility/>

Why aren't you on there, Mike? I'm getting a bit lonely by myself... ;-)

Mel
-- 
http://quirm.net
http://blackwidows.co.uk