WebAIM - Web Accessibility In Mind

E-mail List Archives

Re: Is aria-hidden supposed to only hide content for screen readers/assistive technology, or is it supposed to hide content altogether?

for

From: Jason Megginson
Date: Dec 27, 2012 8:00AM


It is unfortunate that there is no clear consensus or documentation on
this property because in my opinion it is a powerful property that should
be used to hide information from screen readers while retaining
information visually. There is no need for aria-hidden to hide content
that is visually hidden from sighted users; leave that to CSS visibility
and/or display properites.

I too will add another use case in favor of implementing aria-hidden to
"hide" content from screen readers even though the content is active in
the DOM:

Aria-hidden is useful for providing gracefully degrading solutions to
ensure content can work with and without ARIA supported user agents.

Consider the following simplified example:
<a href="#someURL" aria-haspopup="true" onblur="hidePopUp()"
onfocus="showPopUp()">Information
<span style="position:absolute; left:-400px" aria-hidden="true">
Contains Pop-up </span>
</div>

The concept is that when ARIA and aria-hidden is supported, it will ignore
the off-screen positioned text to avoid double speaking by screen readers.
However, if user (a combination of) agents do not support ARIA, it will
read the off-screen text.

Finally, HTML5 has a global attribute hidden="hidden" which is not
supported by IE (at this time) and it hides content from everyone. So
arIa-hidden should be used (and in my opinion formally proposed) to hide
on-screen content from screen readers. Aria-hidden is the closest thing
web developers have to the .silent and .forceSimple (accessibility)
properties of Flash and Flex and as Bryan noted earlier, it can
tremendously add enhanced usability when modal dialog windows are used.

Jason Megginson
SSB BART Group
703-637-8964 (o)
703-244-7755 (c)

-----Original Message-----
From: <EMAIL REMOVED>
[mailto: <EMAIL REMOVED> ] On Behalf Of Maraikayar Prem
Nawaz
Sent: Wednesday, December 26, 2012 11:06 PM
To: WebAIM Discussion List
Subject: Re: [WebAIM] Is aria-hidden supposed to only hide content for
screen readers/assistive technology, or is it supposed to hide content
altogether?

Hi,
Another use case:
aria-hidden is also useful when we want to animate the show/hide by
reducing the height property to produce a slow fading effect. The content
inside the div is hidden to visual users but available to screen
reader
users. Aria-hidden, helps in hiding it from screen readers too.

Regards
-Nawaz


On Fri, Dec 21, 2012 at 11:40 AM, Bryan Garaventa <
<EMAIL REMOVED> > wrote:

> There is benefit though, in keeping them separate, where content is
> hidden from screen reader users, but not visually.
>
> I use this on my bootstrap Modal module, where the background content
> is hidden from screen reader users via aria-hidden, so even though the
> modal content is standard HTML, where all of the background content is
> still visible, but shaded out, for sighted users, the only content
> that screen reader users see is the modal content, and not the
> background. This works equally well in JAWS, NVDA, and Voiceover, in IE,
FF, Chrome, and Safari.
>
> Also, I've used aria-hidden on toggle controls where special Unicode
> characters are used to indicate selection, to prevent the screen
> reader from announcing things like "black upward pointing triangle",
> when this feedback provides no value.
>
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Jared Smith" < <EMAIL REMOVED> >
> To: "WebAIM Discussion List" < <EMAIL REMOVED> >
> Sent: Thursday, December 20, 2012 7:25 PM
> Subject: Re: [WebAIM] Is aria-hidden supposed to only hide content for
> screen readers/assistive technology, or is it supposed to hide content
> altogether?
>
>
> > Think of aria-hidden as simply *indicating* that content is hidden
> > from all users. Aria-hidden should not be used for displaying
> > content visually, but hiding it from screen reader users. However,
> > in practice, it can function this way, though this wouldn't be a
> > correct usage of it.
> >
> > ARIA does not affect standard browser functionality or presentation.
> > In other words, ARIA *couldn't* hide content visually. You'd use CSS
> > display:none to do that. But a powerful benefit of ARIA is that you
> > can use the semantics of ARIA and the power of CSS to get the best
> > of both worlds.
> >
> > For example, you could (and probably always would) have
> > [aria-hidden=true] display:none; in your CSS. In your application,
> > you would simply set the aria-hidden attribute value to true or
> > false. When set to true, the CSS applies which also visually hides
> > the content visually. In practice, aria-hidden and CSS display:none
> > have the same affect on screen readers, the difference is that
> > aria-hidden has semantic meaning and is much easier to toggle in
> > scripting than changing styles, toggling class names, etc.
> >
> > Jared
> > > > > > list messages to <EMAIL REMOVED>
>
> > > list messages to <EMAIL REMOVED>
>
messages to <EMAIL REMOVED>