Violation. The page should provide a skip link at the start of the page or use WAI-ARIA landmarks.
Without going into detail, I find this the worst WCAG standard that exists. A well designed or simple page simply doesn't need a Skip To Main link. In fact, it adds additional effort to navigation. But that isn't RPT's problem. The tool accurately caught the fact there is no Skip.
Manual Check. Provide multiple ways to locate a particular Web page within a set of Web pages.
Again, a good overall philosophy which just adds clutter to a small website. Again, the tool accurately caught the non-existence of a site map or other means of navigating, other than the one link offered -- or using the BACK button on the browser.
Manual check. Allow users to customize their experience of the Web page.
I was surprised to see this flag, and I don't see that either of the WCAG references 1.3g of 4.11 are really relevant. It's a fine perspective to offer designers, but I'm not sure what a tester is supposed to do with this information. RPT notes that warning is issued for every page.
That is just noise in the results. If they want to flag this once for the site, groovy, but this is just adding needless effort.
Potential Violation. Ensure instructions for using page content do not solely rely on sensory characteristics.
This message appeared after adding in the text explaining the RPT results. RPT has the 'intelligence' to think that using the word "top" in a sentence might mean I have unclear directions based on the positioning of information on the page, which potentially violates the spatial location
criterion of WCAG 1.3.3. I changed the line from at the top of the page
to at the start of the page
and the error went away. That's going to create a lot of headscratching of testers wondering why a line was flagged, especially because RPT uses the terminating element of the sentence as the problematic element, not the text itself! My Use of Language page looks at this in depth.
As a side note, the same error then appeared as a different error number for my use of t-o-p ( I can't spell it again or I'd trigger another error) in my explanatory text in the prior paragraph, which made me realize that the issues numbers are unique IDs, so the same issue on multiple pages will all generate different issue numbers.