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.
Plain text documents. Not applicable to technologies that contain markup.
This technique relates to:
The objective of this technique is to recognize a paragraph in a plain text document. A paragraph is a coherent block of text, such as a group of related sentences that develop a single topic or a coherent part of a larger topic.
The beginning of a paragraph is indicated by
the beginning of the content, that is, the paragraph is the first content in the document, or
exactly one blank line preceding the paragraph text
The end of a paragraph is indicated by
the end of the content, that is, the paragraph is the last content in the document, or
one or more blank lines following the paragraph text
A blank line contains zero or more non-printing characters, such as space or tab, followed by a new line.
Two paragraphs. Each starts and ends with a blank line.
Example Code:
This is the first sentence in this
paragraph. Paragraphs may be long
or short.
In this paragraph the first line is
indented. Indented and non-indented
sentences are allowed. White space within
the paragraph lines is ignored in
defining paragraphs. Only completely blank
lines are significant.
No resources available for this technique.
(none currently listed)
For each paragraph:
Check that the paragraph is preceded by exactly one blank line, or that the paragraph is the first content in the Web page
Check that the paragraph is followed by at least one blank line, or that the paragraph is the last content in the Web page.
Check that no paragraph contains any blank lines
All checks above are all true for each paragraph.
If this is a sufficient technique for a success criterion, failing this test procedure does not necessarily mean that the success criterion has not been satisfied in some other way, only that this technique has not been successfully implemented and can not be used to claim conformance.