RE: Question in the use of aria-hidden attribute

Historically aria-hidden="false", when set explicitly, was supposed to expose a hidden container such as one that used the hidden attribute or CSS display:none so that it would be exposed to screen reader users regardless.

This was like a total inversion of the visual state, where it would be hidden visually but exposed to screen reader users like offscreen text.

In practice however this was never supported by Firefox, and was exposed by JAWS in IE11, and as a result has never worked reliably and has caused major problems when the exposed container included active elements like links and buttons, that, even when exposed, are completely inaccessible in this state. This has led to critical accessibility issues occurring in enterprise applications as a result of these discrepancies.

Developers should always avoid setting aria-hidden="false" on anything just to be safe. Removing the attribute altogether is best in most cases.



Bryan Garaventa
Principle Accessibility Architect
Level Access, Inc.
Bryan.Garaventa@LevelAccess.com
415.624.2709 (o)
www.LevelAccess.com<http://www.LevelAccess.com>

From: Sean Murphy (seanmmur) <seanmmur@cisco.com>
Sent: Sunday, December 02, 2018 9:09 PM
To: w3c-wai-ig@w3.org
Subject: Question in the use of aria-hidden attribute

All,

I have seen discussions on  the use of aria-hidden attribute. I am still not 100% sure on the correct usage after reading the relevant documentation.

Aria-hidden="true" - from the current block attribute (tag) and children are removed from the accessibility tree. visually, is the information still present if no CSS attributes used?
Aria-hidden="off" - does nothing to the accessibility tree.
Now for aria-hidden="false". Extracted code below (assume CSS attributes are not hiding the content).

    <div id="main" role="document" aria-hidden="false">
</div>

What would occur with the children tags within the above div? would they still be visible to the accessibility tree?

Sean