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Re: ARIA and Label tags both for Error Messages

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From: Paul J. Adam
Date: Feb 17, 2014 9:42AM

VoiceOver OS X does support aria-describedby it's just treated as a help tag or "hint" and only read after a user adjustable delay, about 7 seconds I think for OS X. I tried your demo page and it worked.

This was a new "feature" Apple released without any documentation or release notes as usual.

So by default it will appear that an aria-describedby or title attribute is not working with VO/OS X but you have to either wait 7 seconds, or adjust the delay under the VoiceOver utility, or press VO+SHIFT+H. However, there is not an audio earcon or other indication when you're focused on an element if it actually has a title or aria-describedby attribute so the user either has to wait to hear it, press VO+SHIFT+H to see if one is there, or just ignore them as Apple seems to be suggesting they do?

Help tag, Hints screenshots can be seen here: http://pauljadam.com/moderna11y/#title

Paul J. Adam
Accessibility Evangelist
www.deque.com

On Feb 17, 2014, at 6:23 AM, Alastair Campbell < <EMAIL REMOVED> > wrote:

> Sorry to jump in the middle a old thread, but I did some testing on this
> recently.
>
> Susan Grossman wrote:
> "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."
>
> I was working with a team that struggled with implementing my suggestion:
> putting error messages in the label. Unfortunately they couldn't match the
> visual design, at least in a responsive layout.
>
> They tried multiple labels (which I thought odd, but couldn't find anything
> that forbade it), but that didn't work very well in NVDA.
>
> Then we tried aria-describedby, but found that VoiceOver on OSX doesn't
> support describedby, test-case:
> www.alastairc.ac/testing/aria-describedby.html
>
> As a temporary fix I think they used aria-labelled by, which consistently
> appends the error message to the primary label. However, describedby would
> seem the better fit in general.
>
> Jukka wrote:
>> "The aria-describedby attribute is supposed to provide information about
> a field, not about an error condition."
>
> So what should associate an error message? The issue is that a screen
> reader user tabbing through the form fields cannot tell which have an error
> unless the message is associated with the input. E.g. in the label, or
> using an ARIA association.
>
> -Alastair
> > >