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

Looks like David is the one to "bell the cat". I have been reading this and
thinking why should one use this attribute when CSS properties display:none
and other properties to place content offscreen are well supported by
browsers and  AT. 

Secondly, hiding and revealing is a presentational function which is best
done by CSS. Using an ARIA attribute to do this  in the HTML code is like
using  a font / color attribute in HTML, is it not? 

 

Sailesh Panchang
Director, Accessibility Services
Deque Systems Inc. (www.deque.com)
11130 Sunrise Valley Drive, Suite #140,
Reston VA 20191
Phone: 703-225-0380 (ext 105)
E-mail: sailesh.panchang@deque.com

  _____  

From: wai-xtech-request@w3.org [mailto:wai-xtech-request@w3.org] On Behalf
Of Steven Faulkner
Sent: Tuesday, September 14, 2010 4:16 PM
To: David Bolter
Cc: James Craig; Leif Halvard Silli; Andi Snow-Weaver; W3C WAI-XTECH; HTML
Accessibility Task Force
Subject: Re: use of aria-hidden to provide a text description not visible on
the page.

 

Hi david, i think your are correct, I myself was under the  impression that
aria-hidden was something more than it is.

 

Setting aria-hidden="true" does not cause AT to hide content, it is used as
a flag that content is hidden using some method such as CSS display:none

 

Is that right? 

 

regards

Stevef

On 14 September 2010 20:47, David Bolter <david.bolter@gmail.com> wrote:

Sorry a bit rushed here and I don't feel like I fully understand this
thread.

Aria-hidden was created to describe the fact that a node was visually hidden
or not such that DOM based AT could have this information. Normally what is
visually hidden or not is already very well supported by the browser
accessibility API because the browser knows very intimately what is visually
hidden or not.

I feel that aria-hidden might have morphed into something else here? Maybe
Andi can cross check this with our implementation guide?

cheers,
David 



On 13/09/10 3:30 PM, James Craig wrote: 

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

 

 




-- 
with regards

Steve Faulkner
Technical Director - TPG Europe
Director - Web Accessibility Tools Consortium
 
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