RE: aria-describedby and visibility, what is the expected spec behavior?

Thank you very much Steve.

 

Have there been any discussions about modifying this behavior, at least for aria-describedby, in future versions of ARIA, so that the visibility of the element is part of the calculation?

 

I am seeing cases where the use of it causes confusion for screen reader users in particular, based on a technique that, while not optimal, seems fairly reasonable for website developers, i.e. put the error messages in place, do the proper associations, then make them visible when needed.

Obviously there is a simple solution to this, i.e. to have Javascript insert the aria-describedby relationship only when needed.

 

I am just wondering about this, because these elements could be hidden using off-screen tecniques if authors feel they need to be available to screen readers even when they are not visible on the screen, else the need of the screen reader user seems to be similar to other users in that sometimes they need to be aware of the information, sometimes not.

 

 

I am fairly new to this list so I do apologize if this has already been discussed.

Thanks

-Birkir

 

From: Steve Faulkner [mailto:faulkner.steve@gmail.com] 
Sent: Thursday, April 17, 2014 1:51 PM
To: Birkir Gunnarsson
Cc: W3C WAI Protocols & Formats
Subject: Re: aria-describedby and visibility, what is the expected spec behavior?

 

 

On 17 April 2014 18:43, Birkir Gunnarsson <birkir.gunnarsson@deque.com> wrote:

s this expected behavior for aria-describedby, that assistive technologies should communicate the value of the associated labelling elements regardless of their visibility settings

 

yes, refer to section 5.6.1.3. Text Alternative Computation of the ARIA implementation guide: http://www.w3.org/WAI/PF/aria-implementation/#mapping_additional_nd



Skip hidden elements unless the author specifies to use them via an aria-labelledby or aria-describedby being used in the current computation. By default, users of assistive technologies won't receive the hidden information, but an author will be able to explicitly override that and include the hidden text alternative as part of the label string sent to the accessibility API.



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Regards

SteveF

HTML 5.1 <http://www.w3.org/html/wg/drafts/html/master/>