What is the importance of warnings and notices

[jasan-s]

I may have missed this but I couldn't find info regarding the matter. Errors in the report are clear that need fixing. but what what about the warnings and notices? Do they require fixing to be compliant?

[TheJaredWilcurt]

• Errors: Known to be in violation.
• Warnings: Can't detect with certainty if it is a violation, but probably is.
• Notices: May be in violation, or may be perfectly fine. Depends entirely on context.

For example, a <table> that is used to display tabular data (like an excel spreadsheet), should have a caption associated with it to summarize the table's contents. However if the <table> is being used for page layout reasons, then no caption is required. The context of how you are using the table is difficult to accurately understand programmatically, so a notice is issued to instruct you to look into the context of this code to determine if it is in violation.

Under the hood Koa11y uses Pa11y to detect these Errors/Warnings/Violations. But if you dig deeper, Pa11y is actually using HTML_CodeSniffer. HTML_CodeSniffer is what is generating the distinction between Errors, Warnings, and Notices. You can read more here:

• http://squizlabs.github.io/HTML_CodeSniffer/Standards/WCAG2/
• http://squizlabs.github.io/HTML_CodeSniffer/Standards/Section508/