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Re: ARIA-HIDDEN

for

From: John Foliot
Date: Nov 5, 2012 2:59PM

Weissenberger, Todd M wrote:
>
> 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.

Funny enough, I was having the exact same conversation with some devs at
work as well. I suspect we will be seeing more and more of this in the next
short while, as it has some significant benefits to the mobile side of
things - text being significantly smaller and easier to transport to
hand-helds, etc. This type of techniques is (I suspect) even better than
sprites/CSS BG images because there are no images being sent down the wire.
(I even have the beginning of a blog-post on this, which may become
redundant if I don't get cracking and finish it soon)

>
> 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.

No, actually, this is a very good use-case for aria-hidden in my opinion,
when you want to hide redundant content from screen readers (in this case,
less redundant and more meaningless). As well, since the last time I tested
aria-hidden (http://john.foliot.ca/aria-hidden) it now appears that we can
expect support from NVDA (http://www.nvda-project.org/ticket/2117) as well
as JAWs going back to IE8 (as well as support in VoiceOver and ChromeVox -
if anyone has test results from other screen readers please speak up), so it
would seem that this is a fairly robust solution.

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

Makes total sense, and in fact I think it is something that, if/when you get
it implemented, we should be sharing back to the community (impetus on me to
finish the blog post too). My vote? Go for it!

JF