WebAIM - Web Accessibility In Mind

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Re: Fourth rule of aria > aria-hidden

for

From: Jeremy Echols
Date: Jan 23, 2018 1:43PM

Vimium, a keyboard plugin for Firefox, offers keyboard-accessible tooltips for clickable elements on a given page. Usually it works well, because the tooltips are rarely more than three characters. But on some "busy" sites, where there are a lot of icon-only buttons smashed together, the tooltips can end up overlaying each other and making it very difficult to discern which keystrokes go with which control.

With a tooltip showing the entire accessible label, I could see this being a very difficult UI to implement in a way that doesn't just make the situation worse. Now add in the fact that in many cases the user won't even know they need the overlay until they've navigated to the wrong location. Don't get me wrong, a feature like this would probably be helpful more often than not, but it's definitely a non-trivial problem to solve.

I feel that web developers need to be made aware of the problems they create, rather than expecting (or hoping) assistive technology finds clever ways to get past poor design.