Re: What do you think about the use of aria-label on elements with no role?

Why would we want a name on a div to be computed from its contents? You
could have a div around an entire paragraph of text.


Rich Schwerdtfeger



From: James Craig <jcraig@apple.com>
To: Dominic Mazzoni <dmazzoni@google.com>
Cc: W3C WAI Protocols & Formats <public-pfwg@w3.org>
Date: 04/06/2015 03:31 PM
Subject: Re: What do you think about the use of aria-label on elements
            with no  role?



I have an action to include a ~“generic” role which would be the default
for div. Once we have that, we can adjust it to match the name computation
accordingly so that generic gets name from contents only.



On Apr 6, 2015, at 1:21 PM, Dominic Mazzoni <dmazzoni@google.com> wrote:

      https://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=28413


      Developers are confused about what should happen if you put an
      aria-label on an element with no role, like an empty <div> element.
      While most browsers do interpret the aria-label and expose it, some
      screen readers ignore it. For example:

      <div aria-label="Label">Text</div>

      Firefox exposes "Label" as the accName, but "Text" as the
      IAccessibleText, and Windows screen readers read out "Text". Safari
      +VoiceOver is different, VoiceOver reads out "Label".

      Do you think the current Windows end-user behavior is correct, or
      not? Should we clarify the spec to make it crystal-clear that adding
      aria-label on any random element does not necessarily override that
      element's text, or should we change the current behavior?

      Note that elements without an ARIA role can still get a label, it
      depends on computed role, not the ARIA role. As an example:

      <h3 aria-label="ARIA Heading">Text Heading</h3>

      Every browser and screen reader combination I tested read out "ARIA
      Heading" here, not "Text Heading".