Checkpoint 1.6 - Mobile-PDA

All files consist of characters which are the human-readable form of the underlying bits and bytes. In order for computing systems to be able to recoginize these characters, they must be infored as to what set of characters has been drawn upon in order to correctly associated the bits and bytes with the characters and thus construct the file. Character encoding refers to the name of the character set. This is sent to the computer device that is utilizing the file so it knows what text 'alphabet' to use when reading it. If the incorrect character encoding is used, the resulting interpretation of the characters will be incorrect and the data will be misinterpreted and misrepresented.

Requirement

The site uses character encoding of UTF-8

Recommendation

UTF-8 defines one set of Unicode character encoding and is good for representing content in multiple languages. UTF-8 efficiently encodes text that consists principally of Latin alphabet characters.

The Default Delivery Context specifies use only of UTF-8, therefore all applications should support UTF-8 at a minimum.

Checking Tool

Check any of the following to ensure that character encoding is set by one of these means:

• the Content-Type HTTP header
• the XML declaration for XML-based content i.e. <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
• the CSS @charset rules for CSS
• the Content-Type Meta element for HTML content

Information Source

The original source of this information is located on the W3C web site  (www.w3.org/TR/WCAG10-TECHS/#tech-identify-grammar)