Re: use of aria-hidden to provide a text description not visible on the page.

copying David Bolter and Andi Snow-Weaver.

On Sep 11, 2010, at 1:04 PM, Leif Halvard Silli wrote:

> Leif Halvard Silli, Sat, 11 Sep 2010 17:10:41 +0200:
> 
> Now I have deinstalled Jaws 10, and reinstalled Jaws 11, and the bug in 
> the interpretation of the test page [*] continues to be there. However, 
> I also found something that appears as a workaround: Aria-labelledby 
> can contain more than one idref. And if at least one of the idrefs 
> points to an element that has not been hidden, then all the elements 
> will be used, even if some of them are hidden. The visible element can 
> simply be an empty element.

The fact that the browser should sent a string value as the label was a relatively recent clarification in the ARIA Implementation Guide (within the last few months, I think). What Mozilla used to do was use the IDREF pointer in the accessibility API, which was problematic if that labeling element was hidden in the API. VoiceOver already calculated the string label on the user agent, and then passed the string label to the API. If I remember correctly, the PFWG decided VoiceOver was doing the right thing here, so what you're seeing is likely just a legacy implementation in Firefox. David may be able to comment on whether or not a more recent build of FF has updated that behavior.

James