WebAIM - Web Accessibility In Mind

E-mail List Archives

Re: Is ARIA the best way to go here, or something else, words with functionality that are not links

for

From: Andrew Kirkpatrick
Date: Dec 12, 2011 3:15PM

Birkir,
These are comboboxes built with javascript. They need proper labels rather than inline labels, and they need the correct ARIA roles/states.

Thanks,
AWK

Andrew Kirkpatrick
Group Product Manager, Accessibility
Adobe Systems

<EMAIL REMOVED>
http://twitter.com/awkawk
http://blogs.adobe.com/accessibility

-----Original Message-----
From: <EMAIL REMOVED> [mailto: <EMAIL REMOVED> ] On Behalf Of Birkir R. Gunnarsson
Sent: Monday, December 12, 2011 5:06 PM
To: WebAIM Discussion List
Subject: [WebAIM] Is ARIA the best way to go here, or something else, words with functionality that are not links

Good afternoon everyone.
I am giving an accessibbility assessment of a webpage http://www.akureyri.is One particular thing bothers me about this page.
There are two words
"vinsælast" og "nytsamlegt" (most popular and useful info, to translate the phrases). These appear, at least in the sourcecode, right after a list of the news stories, not sure how these are located visually.

There is no indication that these are anything but words inside an otherwise empty list, but by looking at the sourcecode, I see that they trigger Javascript that displays a list of relevant links when activated. Using enter to activate the words works just fine, but an average user would never think of trying that, and I only did because they looked peculiar to me and I looked in the sourcecode of the page.
What would you recommend, in this scenario, that needs to change to clearly indicate what happens. Sounds like an aria label would be a good and quick solution, but I am still not up to speed on aria (getting there), so not 100% sure which particular aria technique to recommend. Should these words be made active links or buttons (I know that can be done via aria), so that the users realize they have functionality that can be triggerred via a keyboard?
Thanks
-Birkir