WebAIM - Web Accessibility In Mind

E-mail List Archives

ARIA-HIDDEN

for

From: Weissenberger, Todd M
Date: Nov 5, 2012 12:46PM

Sorry if this has been brought up recently...

A couple of developers in our group are experimenting with web fonts to deliver navigation icons (Directory, A-Z, Search, etc) on our site's main toolbar. The elements have solid text alternatives and tooltips-there is a concern with stutter, but anyway, the web font icons are essentially single characters mapped to a wingding, and these display in the default view of our new design. The screen reader user hears something like:

"V, Search"

...where "V" is the character mapped to the "Search" icon.

The developers want to use "aria-hidden" to hide the stray character (e.g., "e722"), exposing only the text equiv to the screen reader. While it seems counter-intuitive to me to use text only to hide it from the screen reader, the approach tested all right, and the project team seems pretty committed to the web font concept.

If this makes sense to anyone, feel free to drop a line.

Best,
Todd

T.M. Weissenberger
Web Accessibility Coordinator
University of Iowa
<EMAIL REMOVED> <mailto: <EMAIL REMOVED> >
319-384-3323