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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?

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From: Birkir R. Gunnarsson
Date: Dec 27, 2012 8:37AM

I agree. There are reasons for hiding content from screen readers that
still appears visually (basically the equivalent of an empty alt tag
on an image). I hope that aria-hidden will be defined that way for
future updates or documentation, after all, doesn't HTML5 have a
hidden property that will work exactly like aria-hidden, except it
works for all users, not just screen readers or assistive technology?
I can see the programming advantage of using a simple property like
hidden over CSS classes, that's definite. But it does not meet the
needs discussed here of hiding content from users when it not only
does not add to the information presented by the page, but actually
disrupts the users so that they are unable to view the content of the
page.
Cheers
-B

On 12/27/12, Jason Megginson < <EMAIL REMOVED> > wrote:
> It is unfortunate that there is no clear consensus or documentation on
> this property because in my opinion it is a powerful property that should
> be used to hide information from screen readers while retaining
> information visually. There is no need for aria-hidden to hide content
> that is visually hidden from sighted users; leave that to CSS visibility
> and/or display properites.
>
> I too will add another use case in favor of implementing aria-hidden to
> "hide" content from screen readers even though the content is active in
> the DOM:
>
> Aria-hidden is useful for providing gracefully degrading solutions to
> ensure content can work with and without ARIA supported user agents.
>
> Consider the following simplified example:
> <a href="#someURL" aria-haspopup="true" onblur="hidePopUp()"
> onfocus="showPopUp()">Information
> <span style="position:absolute; left:-400px" aria-hidden="true">
> Contains Pop-up </span>
> </div>
>
> The concept is that when ARIA and aria-hidden is supported, it will ignore
> the off-screen positioned text to avoid double speaking by screen readers.
> However, if user (a combination of) agents do not support ARIA, it will
> read the off-screen text.
>
> Finally, HTML5 has a global attribute hidden="hidden" which is not
> supported by IE (at this time) and it hides content from everyone. So
> arIa-hidden should be used (and in my opinion formally proposed) to hide
> on-screen content from screen readers. Aria-hidden is the closest thing
> web developers have to the .silent and .forceSimple (accessibility)
> properties of Flash and Flex and as Bryan noted earlier, it can
> tremendously add enhanced usability when modal dialog windows are used.
>
> Jason Megginson
> SSB BART Group
> 703-637-8964 (o)
> 703-244-7755 (c)
>
>