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

for

From: Jared Smith
Date: Dec 20, 2012 8:25PM

Think of aria-hidden as simply *indicating* that content is hidden
from all users. Aria-hidden should not be used for displaying content
visually, but hiding it from screen reader users. However, in
practice, it can function this way, though this wouldn't be a correct
usage of it.

ARIA does not affect standard browser functionality or presentation.
In other words, ARIA *couldn't* hide content visually. You'd use CSS
display:none to do that. But a powerful benefit of ARIA is that you
can use the semantics of ARIA and the power of CSS to get the best of
both worlds.

For example, you could (and probably always would) have
[aria-hidden=true] display:none;
in your CSS. In your application, you would simply set the aria-hidden
attribute value to true or false. When set to true, the CSS applies
which also visually hides the content visually. In practice,
aria-hidden and CSS display:none have the same affect on screen
readers, the difference is that aria-hidden has semantic meaning and
is much easier to toggle in scripting than changing styles, toggling
class names, etc.

Jared