WebAIM - Web Accessibility In Mind

E-mail List Archives

Re: aria-hidden for content outside modal dialog?

for

From: Robert Fentress
Date: Oct 16, 2015 12:57PM

Good to know; thanks Jonathan!

This serves as a reminder of why we definitely need to trap focus in that
dialog. Still, that is pretty annoying, because that only takes care of
navigating to the focusable elements by tabbing and there are other means
of reaching those focusable elements.

I think in VoiceOver, though, they must not follow the spec, because
according to a video I just saw, applying aria-hidden to a focusable
element does remove it from the web rotor, at least. Do you know if the
other screen readers follow the spec?

If not, is there any way to really hide these elements? I could see this
really resulting in some confusing behavior for a screen reader user.

Best,
Rob

On Fri, Oct 16, 2015 at 1:40 PM, Jonathan Avila < <EMAIL REMOVED> >
wrote:

> > Therefore it is best to use aria-hidden="true" on all page content
> outside of a modal dialog.
> > There have been discussions on whether it is sufficient to lock the
> keyboard navigation within the dialog, and to clearly mark it as such for
> assistive technologies (use the dialog role and an accessible name provided
> through aria-label or aria-labelledby).
>
> As a side note -- according to the ARIA spec aria-hidden of true should be
> ignored by user agents and assistive technology when applied to focusable
> content. So even though aria-hidden should be applied to everything behind
> the modal, in theory it won't really be hiding the focusable content of the
> page from AT.
>
> Jonathan
>
> --
> Jonathan Avila
> Chief Accessibility Officer
> SSB BART Group
> <EMAIL REMOVED>
> Phone 703.637.8957
> Follow us: Facebook | Twitter | LinkedIn | Blog | Newsletter
>
>