WebAIM - Web Accessibility In Mind

E-mail List Archives

Re: JAWS 10 and Hidden Text

for

From: Al Sparber
Date: Mar 23, 2009 8:55PM

Hi Terry,

Yes, I know Firefox has support for ARIA, but the vast majority of JAWS
users do not run Firefox. I guess my point was there are easy ways to make
hidden in-page content accessible without having to use ARIA. The only issue
would be with triggers that come after the hidden content. A better test
would be to script your buttons so that they made the hidden content visible
and then see if you can take JAWS to that content. Right now, the rest only
proves that ARIA can take a label from an element that is hidden. That
doesn't make the form field that is "display:none" accessible.


From: "Terrill Thompson" < <EMAIL REMOVED> >

> Hi Al,
>
> The ARIA on my example page was not intended to be a recommendation for
> how
> to hide text. It's just a test to see whether the "aria-labeledby"
> attribute
> overrides all methods of hiding content using CSS. This would be a handy
> method on a page with dynamic content, where you didn't want anyone,
> including screen readers, to see the content initially, but you wanted
> that
> content to be rendered to everyone later, triggered by certain events.
>
> It actually does work in browsers that support ARIA. I tested it in
> Firefox
> 3, and JAWS 10 read expanded labels for all three buttons, and these
> expanded labels had been hidden using visibility:hidden, display:none, and
> off-screen positioning, respectively. It doesn't work in IE7, but I
> suspect
> it works in IE8 - I haven't tested that.