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Re: A small doubt on alt text

for

From: Joe Chidzik
Date: Feb 19, 2013 1:40AM

> Thanks for a great summary of the situation gentlemen, nicely put.
> In case there is a CSS tooltip text outside of the <a> wouldn't it make the most
> sense to recommend that text be referred to with aria-describedby inside the link,
> but then the text itself be hidden from screen reader users (aria-hidden), so as to
> avoid double speaking it?
> Of course I do need to test what would happen if a text with aria-hidden="true" is
> referenced by aria-describedby.

[Joe Chidzik]
Out of curiosity, I tried the following example with JAWS IE9.

<a href="page2.html" aria-describedby="link-page2">Jacobs Camp </a><span id="link-page2" class="screenreader-text">HS Jacobs - a UAHC camp in> Utica, MS</span>
<a href="page2.html">Jacobs Camp <span id="link-page2" class="screenreader-text">HS Jacobs - a UAHC camp in> Utica, MS</span></a>

The first link uses aria-describedby to attach some (hidden by CSS) descriptive text to the link, the second example uses CSS to hide the descriptive text off-screen, but leaves it within the link element. Whilst both examples read out almost identically when tabbing through the page, they display differently within the JAWS link list. These appear in the links list as:

-"Jacobs camp"
-" Jacobs Camp HS Jacobs - A UAHC camp in Utica, MS"

The second example appearts more useful in this sense, as the descriptive information is available within the links list. Perhaps it would make sense for JAWS to pick up and include text added via aria-describedby when displaying links in the links list, or form elements in the JAWS forms list.

Joe