Re: What is the expected behavior of scrollable divs within touch screen devices, and does ARIA apply?

Hi Bryan, 

The short answer to your question is, there is no recommended mapping, and since this is an HTML-specific problem, you'd be better off asking the HTML accessibility task force. 

The longer answer is one of general usability and assistive technology prerogative to make the best possible experience for the user. For example, I don't typically hear screen reader users asking for more information about the scroll views, b/c most of them don't care and shouldn't have to care. As long as they can navigate to all of the content in the scroll view, it shouldn't matter that it's in a scroll view. 

The lack of AT-triggered interaction on custom scroll views, is still another matter, and of the drivers behind the scrollrequest events defined in IndieUI Events 1.0.

Cheers,
James



On Apr 14, 2014, at 3:10 PM, Bryan Garaventa <bryan.garaventa@ssbbartgroup.com> wrote:

> This is a question I’ve been asked several times lately, and I’m not sure there is a suitable answer.
>  
> Basically, if you have a scrollable div, such as the following:
>  
> <div tabindex=”0” class=”scrollable”>
> Internal markup and content…
> </div>
>  
> Where the class ‘scrollable’ includes the rules for setting a specific height/width and overflow:auto.
>  
> This occurs all over the web to reduce screen real estate, and is happening quite a bit on mobile devices where this is premium.
>  
> So, for iOS touch screen devices using VoiceOver, you can move focus into the content region, then swipe up and down with one finger to scroll through the content.
> E.G
> http://whatsock.com/tsg/Coding%20Arena/Scrollable%20Divs/Scrollable%20Div%20(Internal%20Content)/demo.htm
>  
> However, there is no native way to identify when a particular region is scrollable. Adding role=”region” and aria-label=”Scrollable” does nothing at all and is not conveyed. To my knowledge, this works even less intuitively on the Android using TalkBack. This makes it impossible for a blind user to know that content is scrolled offscreen within a particular region of the UI.
>  
> The only ARIA equivalent that seems like it may have some value is role=scrollbar
> http://www.w3.org/TR/wai-aria/roles#scrollbar
> Though this refers to a trackbar or graphic, and doesn’t actually apply in this case.
>  
> So I guess my question is, is there a documented method for implementing a label to convey that a region is scrollable for touch screen devices?
> If there is not, should there be one?
> And if there is, do touch screen devices support it?
>  
> I’m not sure where the breakdown is.
>  
> Side note: If you hear scrollable in the above demo, it’s because I cheated by using an offscreen positioned live region to announce “scrollable” when focus is first set into the region with VoiceOver running. No other method worked for doing this.
>  
> Thanks,
> Bryan