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Re: Hidden text and mobile devices

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From: Tim Harshbarger
Date: Aug 24, 2016 7:06AM

I think the only fool proof technique that works on Desktop that will also allow you to find the text via swiping or explore by touch is to make the text a visible part of the user interface.

For explore by touch to work, you have to have a touch target. Which means either the text has to be somewhere on the screen or it has to be programmatically associated with something where the screen reader will read that type of information as part of the element.

For controls, you typically could get explore by touch to work if you can associate the information using aria-describedby. But that doesn't work with static text or non-control elements.

You could place the text on the screen and make it transparent--but that is going to show up as white space on the UI and probably alter the look and feel. Honestly, this is yet another thing that would be useful to find out with some user testing. My theory is that on touch devices, screen reader users switch to swipe gestures when they encounter forms--probably because it is a bit too easy with explore by touch to miss something.

However, it sounds like you might be dealing with a table and behavior might be different in that situation.


An idea I have never tested might be to place the text in a div or span, ensure that the div or span takes up a large enough space on the user interface, but move the text outside the div or span