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Re: arai-describedby and aria-hidden

for

From: Don Mauck
Date: Feb 4, 2015 9:22AM

Jared --
Your assertions are correct. We had some Oracle developers trying to do the same thing and there were issues regarding searches. I usually don't do searches as I believe that using the AT package correctly should work, however, what they wanted me to go to was not visible using normal ARIA tricks so I did a search and low and behold, nothing. Now there were probably other issues as well, but I think in this case the use of ARIAHidden is a bit risky.
-----Original Message-----
From: Jared Smith [mailto: <EMAIL REMOVED> ]
Sent: Wednesday, February 04, 2015 9:06 AM
To: WebAIM Discussion List
Subject: Re: [WebAIM] arai-describedby and aria-hidden

I think the intention is to reduce the repetition of content when the screen reader is reading through the page. Labels for form controls will be read twice - once as the label for the control and again when the screen reader reads the label text.

So long as the label reliably reads in all screen readers, I think this is probably fine. But I don't think it's necessary. This repetition is standard, so hiding the label with aria-hidden would be atypical. Additionally, the repetition is generally not present when accessing the form because the user will typically be navigating through the form using the Tab key rather than reading the form from top to bottom.

I suspect it could also cause some issues if the user were to search for text on the page. The browser would direct them to the text (not the labelled control), but the text would be hidden and unread. Yes, a bit of a stretch, but something to consider whenever you use aria-hidden on visible content.

Jared