Guidance on entries in bibliography / references section

[heidivanparys]

Question

Would it be possible to add guidance and examples for writing a bibliography / references section that conforms to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines?

A typical entry could look like the following:

[WCAG21] W3C. Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1. W3C Recommendation. 5 June 2018. Available from: https://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG21/

How should such an entry be adapted in order to conform with the guidelines?

Background

When using this style of writing references for a document that I worked on, I got the feedback that the URL should be available on the title, together with a reference to the good practices described at https://www.w3.org/WAI/tips/writing/#make-link-text-meaningful.

As I would like to keep the style of the bibliography unchanged, at least in the printed version, I created a temporarily work-around by following H33: Supplementing link text with the title attribute, so the reference would like this:

<p>[WCAG21] W3C. Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1. W3C Recommendation. 5 June 2018. Available from: <a href="https://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG21/" title="Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1.">https://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG21/</a></p>

resulting in:

[WCAG21] W3C. Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1. W3C Recommendation. 5 June 2018. Available from: https://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG21/

I then got the idea to look at the references in the aforementioned W3C Recommendation, where I can see that

• all references include the URL in the text itself (using a slightly different style: "URL: ..." instead of "Available from:")
• a link has been added on the title

<p>[WCAG21] W3C. <a href="https://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG21/">Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1</a>. W3C Recommendation. 5 June 2018. Available from: <a href="https://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG21/">https://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG21/</a></p>

resulting in:

[WCAG21] W3C. Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1. W3C Recommendation. 5 June 2018. Available from: https://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG21/

Note: running https://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG21/ through the WAVE Accessibility Extension gives alerts on “Redundant links”:

[fstrr]

This issue is labelled as a discussion, so we’re moving this to Discussions. There doesn’t seem to be an update to make to the documentation, but if that changes, we can move it back to the issues list.