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Re: Fourth rule of aria > aria-hidden

for

From: Birkir R. Gunnarsson
Date: Jan 23, 2018 2:28PM

It's always about finding that balance.
I filed an issue against the proposed success criterion specifically
because it does not address the primary problem, that of icon buttons.
In general we encourage authors not to make labels specifically for
accessibility, unless there are strong reasons for doing so (e.g. to
disambiguate otherwise identical controls that user is likely to get
confused about).
But, again, it doesn't address the problem we are talking about here.
If an author creates an icon button and provides an accessible name,
the button is accessible, even with the new success criterion it is
still accessible, but it is not easily usable to a speech recognition
user.
So what success criterion would ensure icon button accessibility for
speech recognition user?
Should WCAG forbid the use of icon buttons without a text label? It
wouldn't be popular, but maybe that's what would have to be done.
Anyways, these are philosophical speculations mostly, goes to show
accessibility is an art and it can be damn complex. I'm just gald I
have access to all the awesome folks that think about the same things
every day, on WebAIM and elsewhere. That is a privellege.
So chers to y'all!




On 1/23/18, Jeremy Echols < <EMAIL REMOVED> > wrote:
> 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.
>
>