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"Naming Generic Landmarks" errors reported by Siteimprove extension

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From: Jonathan Robert Pool
Date: Mar 2, 2018 11:12PM

As part of my a11y R&D, I am developing an application to produce accessible résumés (jsonresume-theme-a11y).

To monitor its progress in achieving accessibility, I have compared it against some competitors with 6 freely available tools.

The only tool that finds errors in what my application produces is Siteimprove. Almost all the errors it finds are violations of Guideline 1.3.1. Siteimprove says in each case that I must "Use either the WAI-ARIA attribute 'aria-label' or 'aria-labelledby' to name the landmark".

These landmarks are HTML section elements. Each of them has a title attribute whose value describes the nature of the section.

The Siteimprove diagnosis seems to say that the title attributes are not enough. But WAI-ARIA 1.1 says in its section on the aria-label property, "Most host languages provide an attribute that could be used to name the element (e.g., the title attribute in HTML), yet this could present a browser tooltip. In the cases where a visible label or visible tooltip is undesirable, authors MAY set the accessible name of the element using aria-label." To me that means a title is sufficient, and no additional label is necessary. When I test the page with VoiceOver, it reads each section's title right after "Section". Am I misunderstanding something, or is this particular diagnosis asking for more than WAI-ARIA requires?