The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, or WCAG, provide a comprehensive framework for making web content — including websites and applications — more inclusive and user friendly. To keep up with the ever evolving landscape of technology and platforms, WCAG periodically updates its guidelines.
The most recent update, 2.1, was introduced in 2018. It built upon the previous WCAG 2.0 version to address additional additional accessibility issues, with a strong focus on mobile accessibility users with diverse needs.
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) who manage WCAG periodically review and revises the guidelines, including the most recent update in September 2023.
The two key updates are:
- Making Success Criteria 4.1.1 Parsing obsolete
- Minor wording changes (errata) to the guidelines (outlined in the WCAG 2.1 Change Log)
These are ostensibly very minor updates, but the one I want to highlight is the update to Parsing. This is the rationale provided:
Parsing was included in WCAG 2.0 to ensure that browsers and assistive technologies could accurately parse markup and content. Since then, specifications (such as HTML) and browsers have improved how they handle parsing errors. Also, previously assistive technology did their own markup parsing. Now they rely on the browser.
With today’s technology, accessibility issues that would have failed 4.1.1, will fail other criteria, such as Info and Relationships (SC 1.3.1) or Name, Role, Value (SC 4.1.2). Therefore 4.1.1 is no longer needed for accessibility.
Parsing is the process by which web browsers and assistive technology ‘read’ the code of a web page, in order to display the content in a meaningful way. Parsing errors often occur because of issues in the semantic HTML such as missing tags, duplicate attributes, or inappropriate nesting of elements. Parsing issues may result in content being missed or misinterpreted by assistive technology.
In short, the parsing criterion of WCAG 2.1 checks that the code is written properly and cleanly.
Ways to check the Parsing criteria include:
- Inspecting the source code of a webpage
- Validating the HTML using Nu HTML or a similar tool
- Checking the DOM of a webpage using the inspect tool
The update to remove Parsing from 2.1 makes sense as assistive technology no longer directly parses HTML, and additionally if you do accessibility audits you’ll know that issues found in the Parsing checks are usually also addressed by other criteria (such as 1.3.1 Info and Relationships or 4.1.2 Name, Role, Value as mentioned in the commentary).
And a quick note about the second update. Even in documents as formal as WCAG, the occasional rogue typo can’t help but sneak in. The Change Log spills the beans on a few spelling slip ups: “critera” and “ccriteria” have been changed to “criteria”, one repeated paragraph has been removed, and the word “county” has been upgraded to “country”.
For people who often find themselves deep in the bowels of WCAG, deciphering the jargon can prove quite the challenge. Small updates like this show W3C’s commitment to offer the best and current advice.
