See Understanding Techniques for WCAG Success Criteria for important information about the usage of these informative techniques and how they relate to the normative WCAG 2.0 success criteria. The Applicability section explains the scope of the technique, and the presence of techniques for a specific technology does not imply that the technology can be used in all situations to create content that meets WCAG 2.0.
Any technology.
This failure relates to:
The objective of this failure condition is to avoid the use of ASCII art when a text alternative is not provided. Although ASCII art is implemented as a character string, its meaning comes from the pattern of glyphs formed by a visual presentation of that string, not from the text itself. Therefore ASCII art is non-text content and requires a text alternative. Text alternatives, or links to them, should be placed near the ASCII art in order to be associated with it.
The following ASCII art chart lacks a text alternative and therefore does not meet Success Criterion 1.1.1. Note this failure example does in fact cause this page to fail, but you may skip over the example.
Example Code:
<pre>
% __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __
100 | * |
90 | * * |
80 | * * |
70 | @ * |
60 | @ * |
50 | * @ * |
40 | @ * |
30 | * @ @ @ * |
20 | |
10 | @ @ @ @ @ |
0 5 10 15 20 25 30 35 40 45 50 55 60 65 70
Flash frequency (Hz)
</pre>
(none currently listed)
Access a page with ASCII art.
For each instance of ASCII art, check that it has a text alternative.
If check #2 is false, then this failure condition applies and the content fails this Success Criterion.