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Re: Frames and ARIA Landmarks

for

From: Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis
Date: May 8, 2012 12:50AM

On Tue, May 8, 2012 at 5:11 AM, Silpa Mallipeddi
< <EMAIL REMOVED> > wrote:
> When we navigate the page by frames and use the tab key or the arrow
> keys, what's the difference in using ARIA landmark elements

Frames transclude another document into the current document.

http://reference.sitepoint.com/html/elements-frames-windows

http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/obsolete.html#frame

Landmarks designate an area of the current document, such as a
navigation area, or a search area, or the main content area.

http://www.w3.org/WAI/PF/aria-practices/#kbd_layout

http://www.w3.org/WAI/PF/aria/roles#landmark_roles

User agent features for moving between frames won't move you between
landmarks; user agent features for moving between landmarks won't move
you between frames.

> and what use does visually challenged users have.

Their client software might offer features such as:

1. Announce the landmark roles, labels, and descriptions.
2. List landmarks on the current page.
3. Move to next/previous landmark.
4. Hotkeys for jumping to particular landmarks (for example, the
search area) if present.

These features help such users find their way about the document.

> Also I'd like to know if there is a way to kno2w if they are used in
> the web page. Are there techniques to know / determine them and their properties.

The most reliable way is to inspect the DOM of the page for landmark
role attributes (e.g. @role="navigation") or HTML markup that imply
landmark roles (such as the <nav> element). The spec defines how HTML
markup is mapped to ARIA:

http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/elements.html#wai-aria

You can then inspect the attributes of those elements, such as @title
and @aria-label and @aria-describedby.

Client software features for exposing landmarks and accessibility
hierarchy inspectors can also give you some idea, but depends on
client software correctly reading the landmarks out of the page.

Steve Faulkner did a study of support for explicit as opposed to
implicit landmarks about a few months ago:

http://www.paciellogroup.com/blog/2011/11/latest-aria-landmark-support-data/

> How can accessibility users know the issues and the possible solutions
> when ARIA is used.

Especially since HTML not only acts as a host language for the
explicit use of ARIA but also has elements and attributes implicitly
mapped to ARIA, that's a huge topic I'm not going to try and address
here.

--
Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis