Check a Page
Page redirecting
(Referring UWEM Test: 7.5_HTML_01)Test info
Failure cause
The inspected page uses the meta element for auto-redirection
The inspected (X)HTML resource uses
<meta httpequiv="refresh">to create page redirection.
Why this may be a barrier
Automatic redirects disorient users, and can disrupt a browser's history of visited pages.
They make the content unusable for people who have limited reading ability or difficulty concentrating. Auto redirect also causes problems for user-agents that cannot cope with automatic re-directs and may fail to show any content at all.
Good Example
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 //EN">
<html>
<head><title>Sample: Page WITHOUT META REFRESH</title></head>
<body>This page is outdated. <a href=”http://www.egovmon.no/newpage”>Visit the new page</a></body>
</html>
Solution
Do not use markup to redirect pages automatically. Instead, configure the server to perform redirects or inform the user that the current page is outdated and provide a link to the new page.
References
Related WCAG 1.0 Checkpoint
7.5"Until user agents provide the ability to stop autoredirect, do not use markup to redirect pages automatically. Instead, configure the server to perform redirects." [Priority 2]
WCAG 1.0 Checkpoint 7.5Referring UWEM Test
7.5_HTML_01This test is targeted to find elements that can cause page redirecting.
Examples
-
Automatic redirection of pages
Page redirecting with meta-tags may be ignored by user agents.
Remove the page redirecting meta element.If you need to redirect the user to another page, do this with appropriate server-side methods (like e.g. the Apache Module mod_alias), sending the 3XX HTTP Status Codes for redirection. As this is probably a complex task, you might want to contact a service provider to solve this problem.
<head><meta http-equiv="refresh" content="5; URL=http://www.egovmon.no/another_page.html">
<!-- further header information --></head><body>This is the content of the page.</body>
<head>
<!-- further header information --></head><body>This is the content of the page.</body>
