RE: Landmarks and labels

Personally, I think for landmark roles, such as navigation, search, banner, etc., that an explicit name isn't necessary unless there is more than one present on the same page.

So in the case of role=search, it wouldn't be confused with any other type of search landmark on the page, so it's content is then sufficient to explain what it is for and there is no interference with another role of the same type.

If there were more than one though, such as a general site search versus another search landmark for Member search, then an explicit name would be helpful to differentiate them.

This seems logical anyway.

Obviously an explicit name will always be needed for role=region though.



-----Original Message-----
From: Léonie Watson [mailto:tink@tink.uk] 
Sent: Monday, February 29, 2016 1:50 PM
To: public-aria@w3.org
Subject: Landmarks and labels

Hello,

On the APG call today we discussed techniques for providing labels for multiple instances of the same landmark within a document. We touched on the potential repetition problem, caused when a heading is associated with a landmark region using aria-labelledby, and where the heading includes the name of the landmark region. For example:

<div id="search" role="search" aria-labelledby="searchLabel">
<h2 id="searchLabel">Site search</h2>
...
</div>

The problem being that the word "search " would then be repeated by screen readers ("Site search search region" is how Jaws would announce it for example).

The thing is that I'm struggling to think of an example where the heading wouldn't duplicate the name of the landmark. If the purpose of the heading is to preface the content within that section, it sort of has to mention what that content is/does, doesn't it?

For example the heading "Site" would not make sense visually (for the above example), unless the word "search" was included also would it?

I'm thinking out loud here, so feel free to shoot this down with some cases where the heading wouldn't need to include the landmark role! Thanks.

Léonie.

Received on Monday, 29 February 2016 22:28:29 UTC