RE: Footnotes and Tooltips

I don’t recommend using aria-haspopup on a button that opens a dialog. Currently, any value of aria-haspopup on a button will turn the button into a menu button in windows accessibility APIs.

 

In ARIA 1.1., the ARIA WG added new values for aria-haspopup to support new types of popups that a combobox could open (grid, tree, and dialog). We should have said not to use those values on button because of these limitations in the accessibility APIs on Windows … but we haven’t done that. It is a lingering issue. And, in retrospect, this change to aria-haspopup was not necessary and has been somewhat problematic.

 

The ARIA authoring practices task force plans to provide more guidance on haspopup.

 

Best,

Matt

 

From: Guy Hickling <guy.hickling@gmail.com> 
Sent: Monday, April 27, 2020 7:48 PM
To: WAI Interest Group discussion list <w3c-wai-ig@w3.org>
Subject: Re: Footnotes and Tooltips

 

Your client is quite right! Footnotes, and the method described in those articles is a somewhat old-fashioned way of doing them now. It clumsy for keyboard and blind users to use, and for the developer to program. and may have the inherent problem of coping with cases where more than one reverence on the page go to the same footnote, and how to return from that. Accessibility consultants these days may likely recommend dispensing with footnotes completely and using popup "Info" boxes to show the text instead. I certainly do as people are well used to popups now. That way the user is not taken off to another part of the page. 

 

But as Caroline points out, it is important to get it right for keyboard users and screen reader users, neither of whom want to see or hear the footnote unless they have explicitly asked for it. So I don't like to use the tooltip terminology. In other words, do it by marking the reference up as a button that reveals the popup text if they press Enter or Spacebar, and give the button an aria-haspopup attribute. And it must have a means to close it. There are a number of accessibility considerations to consider as for any popup box, but hopefully the developers will already have library markup for this as most websites use popup dialogs and boxes in all kinds of places. 

 

Regards,
Guy Hickling
Freelance Accessibility Consultant