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Re: ARIA modal dialogs only read out focusable items (formsand links)

for

From: Jared Smith
Date: Jan 4, 2013 1:03PM

On Fri, Jan 4, 2013 at 12:50 PM, Sailesh Panchang wrote:

> Joseph's email above refers to content that is not focusable but
> should be available to AT. Aria-hidden will not help there, right?

It will if you do not set use an ARIA role to trigger application mode
on the dialog. In other words, aria-hidden would hide everything from
AT except for the dialog box, which could then be navigated as
standard web content.

A difficulty with this approach is that the dialog must generally be
in the DOM or markup at the very beginning or very end of the
document. It cannot be somewhere within the content that has
aria-hidden applied to it - you can't unhide content within hidden
content (i.e., aria-hiddenúlse doesn't work inside
aria-hidden=true).

> Also, with reference to Jared's note:
>>> All content within a modal dialog is to be keyboard focusable, at least as far as ARIA is
>>>concerned.
> Is this a practical and realistic assumption?

I think this thread is highlighting that it is not always practical.
It requires hacks and/or ignoring this aspect of the specification.
Remember, however, that ARIA is intended for *applications*, in which
it would generally be uncommon for a dialog to contain anything other
than focusable controls. It is our applying the dialog role to
non-application dialogs that is causing these issues.

Jared