developing Supplemental requirement

Non-literal language explained

Group: text-and-wording • Guideline: clear-language

Summary in Plain English

Idioms, metaphors and other non-literal language come with an explanation or an unambiguous alternative in text. Poetic, scriptural, artistic and expressive content is exempt.

Why It Matters

Non-literal language is routinely read literally by people with some cognitive disabilities and by autistic readers, and it rarely survives translation.

Scope: When This Applies

The draft's own conditions, quoted from guidelines/groups/text-and-wording/clear-language/non-literal-language-explained.md.

Except when

text content is:
- poetic,
- scriptural,
- artistic, or
- expressive rather than informational.

W3C Working Group Status

W3C Maturity Status: developing

Track / Group: text-and-wording

Open Questions Recorded in the Draft

The editors' own notes (:::ednote) in guidelines/groups/text-and-wording/clear-language/non-literal-language-explained.md. These are the questions the group has written down as unresolved — not a summary of discussion written here.

Translation software and other tools can aid content authors in identifying non-literal language.

W3C Threads on This Provision

3 GitHub threads carrying 0 comments, fetched from w3c/wcag3 by the tracker. Titles, numbers and states are the threads' own.

Nobody has read these threads and written up the positions yet, so only the threads themselves are listed.

W3C Raw Source Text

Verbatim from guidelines/groups/text-and-wording/clear-language/non-literal-language-explained.md · informative document: informative/guidelines/text-and-wording/clear-language/non-literal-language-explained.md

Explanations or unambiguous alternatives are available in text content for non-literal language, such as idioms and metaphors.

:::except-when
* text content is:
  * poetic,
  * scriptural,
  * artistic, or
  * expressive rather than informational.
:::

:::ednote
Translation software and other tools can aid content authors in identifying non-literal language.
:::