RE: Question in the use of aria-hidden attribute

Thanks everyone for the answers. I was going to ask the purpose of aria-hidden="false". As off and false in my mind is the same. But Brian's explanation explains the reasoning behind the false value. People are very confused with this aria attribute that I have seen.


Question, if someone wants to hide content from a screen reader and only expose it when required. I assume they should use aria-hidden="off" to re-populate the accessibility tree.

Just confirming I fully understand this aria property.

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Sean Murphy
SR ENGINEER.SOFTWARE ENGINEERING
seanmmur@cisco.com<mailto:seanmmur@cisco.com>
Tel: +61 2 8446 7751










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From: Bryan Garaventa <bryan.garaventa@levelaccess.com>
Sent: Tuesday, 4 December 2018 4:17 AM
To: Sean Murphy (seanmmur) <seanmmur@cisco.com>; w3c-wai-ig@w3.org
Subject: 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<mailto:Bryan.Garaventa@LevelAccess.com>
415.624.2709 (o)
www.LevelAccess.com<http://www.LevelAccess.com>

From: Sean Murphy (seanmmur) <seanmmur@cisco.com<mailto:seanmmur@cisco.com>>
Sent: Sunday, December 02, 2018 9:09 PM
To: w3c-wai-ig@w3.org<mailto: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