Everybody knows that we must not use aria-hidden on interactive elements. But why is that a problem? I decided to check for myself, so that I can explain it better the next time I will be asked.
Tag: NVDA
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I like the idea behind aria-errormessage and hope it will soon get enough support to make error messages more accessible and establish itself as best practice. NVDA support is coming soon, but beware potential iOS bug and lack of TalkBack support…
There are some limited resources on ARIA role application, but I missed more information for mobile screen readers and just quickly checked the situation on Android and iPhone. It seems that support is not there, besides some small quirks. Be even more careful with role = application!
Inert is still useful and although we are slowly getting native dialog we can still benefit from using inert when we don’t strictly use dialogs or modals.
Accessibility tree in browser and screen-reader’s speech logs are extremely valuable tools when we want to check how HTML, CSS and ARIA translate to assistive technologies like screen-readers, no doubt about that. But please make sure to go through to the end – do listen to your screen-readers and in different combinations with browsers. As sometimes that’s the only way to find out about real problems.
The journey from content creator to end user is quite long. At least in terms of different software that needs to deliver. And as we all know – software has bugs. And sometimes even so called features that can actually be called bugs as well. So please test and if we find a problem – report it, so that we improve the accessibility one step at a time.
Every (front-end) developer should add screen-reader to their tools. Screen-reader experience can really help us make products more accessible and also be better at our coding. Combinations of screen-readers and browsers can get over complicated, so it is important to think if code we write is supported for majority.
I organized an accessibility workshop for our front-end and full-stack developers, user interface and user experience designers and others involved in digital production. This post will concentrate on screen-reader (SR) users way of navigation because it may surprise non-screen-reader users quite a lot.
Why are we not encouraged to use ARIA everywhere? Because it is a last option – if we are not able to find a native semantic element, or if we want to create something special, then we can use ARIA. But it should be used wisely!
Some reflections on my newly acquired Web Accessibility Specialist certification and a mention of Neuralink that will be demoed today and can have positive implications on accessibility as well. If used correctly.
Relying on semantic text highlighting alone can be dangerous as screen readers use to ignore special emphasizing tags to prevent clutter to their users.