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Is aria-hidden supposed to only hide content for screen readers/assistive technology, or is it supposed to hide content altogether?

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From: Birkir R. Gunnarsson
Date: Dec 20, 2012 7:45PM


Hi everyone

I was testing out aria-hidden as a solution to a problem brought up in
my previous thread.
I found a great set of examples from Steve falkner on his/the Paciello site
http://www.paciellogroup.com/blog/2012/05/html5-accessibility-chops-hidden-and-aria-hidden/

Judging by that text, it seems that the purpose of aria-hidden is to
hide all content from all users (similar to display:none), except that
only some A.T. apps have implementedit, no one else has botherred.
If I understand this text correctly, there is no proposed solution
that will only hide content from assistive technology, whilst keeping
it present vissibly/on the page.
I am just wondering if this is correct, since I would think there are
use cases where hiding content from, say, screen readers, whilst
keeping it accessible and vissible to other users, is a reasonable
solution (dyslexic users might benefit from some animation on a page
for instance, whilst that animation disrupts screen readers reading
the page).
I am merely curious about this, of course I will go and Google the
actual definition of these things from the W3C, but I was just curious
if someone who has implemented and used aria-hidden has an opinion on
this, and, if I am right, isn't it a problem that there is no
widespread acceptable and relatively simple technique to hide content
from some assistive technologies, whilst keeping it accessible to
others, after all we use the opposite quite a bit by hiding text
off-screen with CSS?
Cheers
-B