WebAIM - Web Accessibility In Mind

E-mail List Archives

Re: If you use the WAI-ARIA role “application”, please do so wisely!

for

From: Ryan Hemphill
Date: Feb 6, 2012 2:06PM

This is a tricky one, I agree.

There is more to this, however. One of the problems that you can run into
when using rich internet applications is a 'loss of synch' between the
browser and screen reader (usually JAWS) and application mode avoids these
kinds of hiccups. One of the places I see this being a real problem is
when rich internet applications leverahe AJAX or xml-xslt transforms which
can sometimes build in such a way that the screen reader gets the wrong
information. From what I have been able to gather, much of this comes from
the fact that the content is being passed to the screen reader before it is
displayed. While some people may think this isn't the case, I have seen
some pretty extreme examples of where content is being read off before it
ever gets displayed on the screen at all - sometimes 15 seconds.

Anyway, I would say that the more sophisticated your application, the more
likely that you are going to need to use - and understand - application
mode.

- Ryan

On Mon, Feb 6, 2012 at 2:46 PM, Kevin Chao < <EMAIL REMOVED> > wrote:

> Marco Zehe, Hamburg, Germany, Mozilla a11y QA.
> wrote up this great, informative, and practical: New blog post: If you
> use the WAI-ARIA role "application", do so wisely!
>
> http://www.marcozehe.de/2012/02/06/if-you-use-the-wai-aria-role-application-please-do-so-wisely/
> #a11y #aria #axs
>
> Kevin
>