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Results of Questionnaire Parsing note editorial - WCAG 2.0 / 2.1

The results of this questionnaire are available to anybody.

This questionnaire was open from 2023-03-30 to 2023-04-03.

6 answers have been received.

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Parsing note wording

1. Parsing note wording

In previous discussions we have decided to add a note to the WCAG 2.0 and 2.1 versions of 4.1.1 parsing.

The note in the CFC was:

This Success Criterion should be considered as automatically met for any content using HTML. Modern browsers all have automatic error correction for parsing errors, and issues such as incorrect states or names due to a duplicate ID, or missing roles due to inappropriately nested elements are covered by different Success Criteria. This criterion can therefore be ignored as being redundant. It no longer provides any benefit to people with disabilities in itself and should not be enforced or required for accessibility.

During the CFC an update was proposed to:

This Success Criterion should be considered as automatically met for any content using HTML. Since this criterion was written, the HTML Standard has adopted specific requirements governing how user agents must handle incomplete tags, incorrect element nesting, duplicate attributes, and non-unique IDs. Although the HTML Standard treats some of these cases as non-conforming for authors, it is considered to "allow these features" for the purposes of this Success Criterion because the specification requires that user agents support handling these cases consistently. In practice, this criterion no longer provides any benefit to people with disabilities in itself; issues such as missing roles due to inappropriately nested elements or incorrect states or names due to a duplicate ID are covered by different Success Criteria and should be reported there rather than as issues with 4.1.1.

We'd like to gather any concerns or updates to the text before adding it.

Do you:

Summary

Choice	All responders
Choice	Results
Agree with the update	5
Agree with adjustment (please comment with the adjustment)	1
Something else

Details

Responder	Parsing note wording	Comments
Jonathan Avila	Agree with the update	The update is better than the previous note. We'll likely need to address other things as well such as techniques, etc.
Laura Carlson	Agree with the update
Michael Gower	Agree with the update
Wilco Fiers	Agree with adjustment (please comment with the adjustment)	Two minor points - Use "satisfied" instead of "met". The conformance section says success criteria have to be satisfied. - Please remove "automatically" from "automatically met". It hardly matters if this is automatically or if someone does this manually. It's a completely unnecessary qualifier. ALSO: I think we need to talk about using this note in WCAG 2.2 in place of removal of the SC. This is substantial new information on the decision regarding the removal of 4.1.1. Even if we change nothing, we should have the conversation.
Peter Bossley	Agree with the update
Bruce Bailey	Agree with the update