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Re: Opacity Zero and Screen Readers

for

From: Birkir R. Gunnarsson
Date: Jul 19, 2016 11:49AM

You are pretty safe using display: none; to hide content from all users.
I would always go with that, unless you have specific reasons for
using visibility: hidden. Then I would supplement that with
aria-hidden="true".



On 7/19/16, Lovely, Brian (CONT) < <EMAIL REMOVED> > wrote:
> Thanks, Patrick!
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: WebAIM-Forum [mailto: <EMAIL REMOVED> ] On Behalf
> Of Patrick H. Lauke
> Sent: Tuesday, July 19, 2016 11:27 AM
> To: <EMAIL REMOVED>
> Subject: Re: [WebAIM] Opacity Zero and Screen Readers
>
> On 19/07/2016 16:12, Lovely, Brian (CONT) wrote:
>> So the answer is "yes"? During a previous assessment, I had an element
>> that the developer had really, really tried to hide. It was set to
>> visibility:hidden, opacity:0, and was positioned offscreen. I set
>> visibility to visible in order to see what the screen reader would
>> announce when it was able to detect the element. I didn't hear
>> anything, but then set the opacity to 1 and was then able to hear the
>> element announced. As this was not a very exhaustive test, I wasn't
>> sure if this was just a fluke situation or not.
>
> The actual behavior is inconsistent across browser/AT combinations. I seem
> to remember that opacity usually makes no difference, but that
> visibility:hidden in most cases hides the content. But it's not something
> that should be relied on (or at least something that should be thoroughly
> tested across multiple browser/AT combinations before being used in
> production).
>
> See http://juicystudio.com/article/screen-readers-display-none.php,
> http://webaim.org/techniques/css/invisiblecontent/,
> https://www.paciellogroup.com/blog/2016/01/the-state-of-hidden-content-support-in-2016/
>
> P
> --
> Patrick H. Lauke
>
> www.splintered.co.uk | https://github.com/patrickhlauke
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> twitter: @patrick_h_lauke | skype: patrick_h_lauke
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