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Re: ARIA-HIDDEN

for

From: Ken Petri
Date: Nov 5, 2012 3:44PM

Interestingly, here's a piece by Chris Coyier that has techniques for this:
http://css-tricks.com/html-for-icon-font-usage/. Bonus, it recommends using
the awesome IcoMoon icon font tool.


ken
--
Ken Petri
Program Director, OSU Web Accessibility Center
102D Pomerene Hall, 1760 Neil Avenue, Columbus, Ohio 43210
Office: 614.292.1760 | Mobile: 614.218.1499 | Fax: 614.292.4190
http://wac.osu.edu | <EMAIL REMOVED>



On Mon, Nov 5, 2012 at 4:59 PM, John Foliot < <EMAIL REMOVED> > wrote:

> 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
>
>
>
> > > >
>
>