WebAIM - Web Accessibility In Mind

E-mail List Archives

Re: NVDA not recognizing role="region"

for

From: Bryan Garaventa
Date: Dec 26, 2013 5:48PM


NVDA should announce when a region is present to identify the beginning and
ending boundaries, including the explicit label text, so entering a bug
about this is a good idea.

----- Original Message -----
From: "Birkir R. Gunnarsson" < <EMAIL REMOVED> >
To: "WebAIM Discussion List" < <EMAIL REMOVED> >
Sent: Thursday, December 26, 2013 1:09 PM
Subject: [WebAIM] NVDA not recognizing role="region"


> Greetings guys.
>
> I hope you had yourselves a merry little Christmas (or whatever you
> choose to call the holiday) and are getting ready for a happy,
> prosperous and accessible 2014.
> I have one question for you in that respect.
> There are situations where I feel no ARIA landmark role except region
> is suitable for the type of content that is being displayed on a page.
> This is particularly common for content whose visibility is toggled
> with Javascript and CSS for instance.
> Often this is content that contains a mixture of links and text, such
> as customer info, banking info etc.
> The WAI-ARIA roles model
> does allow this role to be used, see
> http://www.w3.org/TR/wai-aria/roles#region
> though it is recommended that more specific ARIA landmark roles be
> used whenever possible, which I agree with.
> However, NVDA neither recognizes a div with role="region" as a
> landmark, nor does it announce its aria-label or aria-labelledby
> properties (obviously).
> Jaws recognizes the region, includes it in its list of landmarks and
> announces its accessible name, both in IE and FF.
> My question is basically whether I am over interpreting the region
> attribute and misappropriating it, or whether NVDA is too strict in
> their interpretation of the role.
> If you know of existing discussions or notes in NVDA regarding
> role="region" it would be most appreciated, as well as any general
> opinions you may have.
> I wanted to bring this up here first, as I am sure others have
> wondered about it, and perhaps my testing is inaccurate (though I have
> tried two different versions of NVDA with two different versions of
> FireFox).
> I will subsequently take it to the NVDA appropriate discussion list or
> issue ticket database unless someone tells me this has been discussed
> and my interpretation of this aria landmark role is overly generous.
> I just do not see any other role that fits the type of content I am
> looking at, and the section element, I believe, is not yet backwards
> compatible enough to be used in place of this landmark role. I also
> believe this is a valuable tool to non-visually designate an area of a
> webpage, particularly when loaded via scripting and one which has a
> relationship with a triggering element elsewhere on the page.
>
> Cheers
> -B
> Birkir Gunnarsson
> Accessibility SME | Deque Systems
>
> --
> Work hard. Have fun. Make history.
> > >