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Re: Value and prioritization of large-scale things a web site can do for improved accessibility

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From: Steve Green
Date: Apr 17, 2013 10:51AM

To take your points in order, my opinion would be:

1. Yes, use HTML5 semantic elements. That is already useful and will become increasingly so.
2. ARIA landmark roles can be useful so they are worth adding.
3. Other ARIA markup is likely to be less useful, especially in generic templates. Given that there is a cost to everything, I see this as a low priority.
4. Title attributes on links only add value if they are different from the anchor text and provide necessary additional information. That is rarely going to be the case in templates. Unnecessary tooltips have an adverse effect on some users, so that has to be balanced against the benefit of providing them. This is one of many cases where an accessibility feature is not necessarily either beneficial or neutral.
5. Set the title attribute for content containers would be a definite No for me. It would particularly impact screen magnifier users because the tooltips are proportionately larger than usual and a tooltip would always be present no matter where the mouse is moved.

Steve Green
Managing Director
Test Partners Ltd

-----Original Message-----
From: <EMAIL REMOVED> [mailto: <EMAIL REMOVED> ] On Behalf Of Dave Merrill
Sent: 17 April 2013 16:55
To: <EMAIL REMOVED>
Subject: [WebAIM] Value and prioritization of large-scale things a web site can do for improved accessibility

Hi folks, first post, hope it's not unwelcome-ly long or obvious. By way of intro, I'm a developer at a web software company, not an accessibility expert. I've recently gotten interested in accessibility, and if there are things we can do to improve access, without a lot of complexity either for us to build or for our users to user, I may be able to get some of that in.

By "large-scale", I mean page structure changes that can be done on the site's main templates, rather than hand-tweaked changes to each page. For example, the one step of applying ARIA landmark roles is in reach for many sites, just by updating their blog or content management software templates. Doing the whole nine yards to annotate every widget's interaction state is much harder, unless the underlying platform already does it.

Here are some possible steps a site could take, that are all relatively low-hanging fruit:

- Place all content within HTML5 semantic container tags, specifically article, aside ,nav, section, figure, figcaption, footer, header, and main
- Assign ARIA landmark roles to content containers and HTML headings
- Assign aria-label, aria-labelledby and aria-describedby attributes to appropriate content containers
- Set the title attribute on links
- Set the title attribute for content containers (less desirable, since it's seen by all, and containers aren't typically labelled this way)

Which of those would you say are worth doing? Taken together, would they make a real difference in accessibility? Are there other simple things that could be done, ideally the page template level, rather than specific hand tweaks for every page?

(I'm specifically not talking about forms or interactivity, that's a whole other topic. I'm also not talking about making sure HTML and image colors have good contrast, not because it's unimportant, but because it has to be done on a case-by-case basic, rather than in global templates.)

Thanks in advance for any thoughts,

Dave Merrill