Hey, everybody. Josh here with Online ADA, and in this video we’re gonna cover 1.3.2 of the WCAG 2.1 accessibility guidelines.
This article is called ‘Meaningful Sequence’, and it is a level A article. Let’s jump into the description.
The documentation for this article says, when the sequence in which content is presented effects its meaning, a correct reading sequence can be prorammatically determined.
This article is mostly in relation to the use of white space within your content, to format it a certain way. And what I mean by that is, if you have a table that you are presenting to your users on your web page, it needs to be a constructed inside of an HTML table element, rather than just straight text that you have a bunch of spaces underneath to give your heading some space.
And maybe you have just one line that has all your headers and you have, like, header one and then a bunch of space and header two and a bunch of space and header three. Then all your content is sort of just spaced out using extra white space. That is a no no. You don’t wanna do that because the screen reader isn’t going to be able to determine what sorts of relationships that content has. So if you’re creating a table for the users on your website, then you wanna make sure that you’re using a proper HTML table element. That is the best practice.
Same thing goes for list of things. If your gonna have a list, it is not technically wrong to put your content in a list format using white space. That’s actually not incorrect. But a best practice in that case would be to use a UL element and then LI elements for all the children of that list. UL, standing for unordered list.
OL is another option. That would be for an ordered list, and that would be another situation that we would cover in meaningful sequence. Ordered lists, specifically are lists where as, contrary to unordered list, where you can put things in any order you want to and that technically doesn’t affect the meaning. In an ordered list the very first thing is step one. So if you have like a recipe and the first step is to boil water, than in your ordered list it would effect meaning if you put that step at the bottom or somewhere in the middle. You want that to be number one. So when that content needs to be presented in order and use an ordered list and it has it’s proper place in the list.
Another situation I’ve seen out in the field when I’m doing my audits is when people try to make a two or three column layout on their page for their text content. That’s, again, not a good idea. You wanna use a layout table for that situation and that’s going to give the proper relationship between the content and read it off to the screen reader. So that’s pretty much it for 1.3.2.
Thanks for joining me in this video and I’ll see you in the next.