WebAIM - Web Accessibility In Mind

E-mail List Archives

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

for

From: Dave Merrill
Date: Apr 17, 2013 11:27AM

Steve, thanks very much for taking the time to weigh in here, I appreciate
it, very useful feedback.

Re other ARIA markup, if you have a heading as the first item inside a
semantic container, is there any point to linking the two explicitly
with aria-labelledby
on the container pointing to the heading?

The most recent screen reader users survey shows one real-world perspective:
- Headings are by far the most used in-page navigation
- Most reader users are now aware or ARIA landmarks but usage frequency is
quite varied
- The most-reported accessibility blockers are inaccessible Flash and
CAPTCHA, not information discovery

That survey is here (which I'm sure you all know):
http://webaim.org/projects/screenreadersurvey4/


On Wed, Apr 17, 2013 at 12:51 PM, Steve Green <
<EMAIL REMOVED> > wrote:

> 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
> > > messages to <EMAIL REMOVED>
> > > >



--
Dave Merrill