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Re: ARIA and Label tags both for Error Messages

for

From: Paul J. Adam
Date: Feb 11, 2014 3:05PM

Not true, WAI-ARIA is well supported in JAWS, NVDA, and VoiceOver... the big 3 screen readers, and only JAWS costs extra money.

I would ask them for more specific supporting evidence for their claims that ARIA is not supported well enough, e.g. who what where when and why it fails.

Yes the redundancy may make it pointless to use ARIA if you're already shoving everything into the label tag? You could try doing ARIA with fallback, i.e. aria-hidden on the extra label text and retain use of aria-describedby but this seem like double work and not worth it.

You could also use the title attribute to communicate info both visually as at tooltip and non-visually to the screen reader. Keyboard-only users without a screen reader will never see/hear the title attributes though.

Good luck! Myself, I've been using WAI-ARIA for years! It's past time for everyone to get on board :)


Paul J. Adam
Accessibility Evangelist
www.deque.com

On Feb 11, 2014, at 3:48 PM, Susan Grossman < <EMAIL REMOVED> > wrote:

> We have been associating error messages to form fields using
> aria-describedby, and the screen reader users who tested it thought it
> worked well for them.
>
> We have gotten some push back from a federal agency saying that no ARIA is
> supported well enough to rely on and that we must you both aria and label
> tags to associate the error messages.
>
> My questions:
>
> 1) Do others agree that even aria-describedby (no Live Regions, etc.)
> isn't supported enough to stand on it's own
>
> 2) Would the redundancy caused by both label tags and aria become too much
> to hear for those who can utilize ARIA?
>
> 3) If yes to 1 and 2, does that leave us with just implementing the
> association with label tags, or is there something else we should be
> considering?
>
> Understand that we can still keep things like aria-required (or similar)
> because they're a progressive enhancement - asterisk or (optional) is
> still there in the form element label.
>
> Any help is appreciated - couldn't quite find this discussion in archives
>
>
> --
> *Susan R. Grossman*
> <EMAIL REMOVED>
> > >