RE: Question in the use of aria-hidden attribute

I agree with removing the attribute. Even better, avoid using it at all
unless there is literally no other way to achieve a good result.

 

Aria-hidden="true" is extremely dangerous. If you think you need to use it,
which you probably do not, test, test, and over test. Then, put in some kind
of redundant test plan.

 

Right now, there are several sites, including dropbox and 1password,  where
opening a modal completely breaks the site because they thought using
aria-hidden was a good idea. The risk of using aria-hidden to hide content
under a modal is not offset by the benefits most people assume. If the
dialog is a DOM descendant of the content at a lower z, then everything
breaks for screen reader users. You can do nothing; you are dead in the
water.

 

Matt King

 

From: Bryan Garaventa <bryan.garaventa@levelaccess.com> 
Sent: Monday, December 3, 2018 9:17 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