F87: CSS Generated Content and WCAG Conformance
February 24, 2019; 8 Comments
The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) does a good job of providing supporting techniques to help reviewers determine if a specific case would violate a given Success Criterion (SC). WCAG 2.0, which became a recommendation at the end of 2008, has carried these techniques over to WCAG 2.1, finalized in June 2018. In that decade, a lot has changed in support for standards among browsers and assistive technology (AT), along with heuristics in AT based on real world code.
WCAG 2 has a Success Criterion (SC) at Level A related to ensuring information is available to AT, either programmatically or as plain text (1.3.1 Info and Relationships). It includes ensuring you do not render data grids as ASCII columns, using tables for layout, or mis-using ARIA’s presentation role.
That WCAG SC also has a technique on CSS generated content, specifically F87: Failure of Success Criterion 1.3.1 due to inserting non-decorative content by using :before and :after pseudo-elements and the ‘content’ property in CSS. Yes, that is its full name (that verbosity is not a bad thing).
I know from experience that some people use the WCAG Failures techniques as a quick way to [...]