Old versions may report more accessibility issues TN-Q19

Older versions of SortSite may report more accessibility issues than recent versions due a normative change to the WCAG Standard in October 2023.

Background

Success criteria 4.1.1 Parsing was originally added to WCAG 2.0 in 2008 to prevent accessibility problems arising when different assistive technologies handled invalid HTML inconsistently (such as invalid HTML code that caused problems in one screen reader, but not in another screen reader). These inconsistencies have been gradually eliminated due to a combination of standardized parsing behaviour for invalid markup in the HTML Living Standard, alongside an extensive test suite at Web Platform Tests.

During the development of WCAG 2.2 it became apparent that success criteria 4.1.1 Parsing was becoming irrelevant due to the standardization of HTML parsing and the consequent reduction in differences parsing invalid markup.

Removal of WCAG 4.1.1

This led to the removal of 4.1.1 Parsing in all versions of WCAG 2.x in September and October 2023 - after two years of intense debate by the WCAG standards working group.

• WCAG 2.2 marks SC 4.1.1 as ‘obsolete and removed’ in the recommendation published on October 5, 2023
• WCAG 2.1 was updated to say SC 4.1.1 is always satisified for HTML pages in the recommendation published on September 21, 2023
• WCAG 2.0 was updated to say SC 4.1.1 is always satisified for HTML pages in the errata published September 9, 2023

Reports from recent versions

The scanning engine stopped reporting 4.1.1 failures in version 6.50 which was released the same day WCAG 2.2 was published.

Reports from older versions

SortSite 6.49 and earlier versions were released prior to October 2023, so they use the original 4.1.1 Parsing definition which is now obsolete. This means any 4.1.1 issues in reports produced by these older versions should be disregarded.

Applies To: SortSite

Last Reviewed: August 7, 2025