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Re: How to handle Heading under Section

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From: chagnon@pubcom.com
Date: Apr 29, 2018 1:29PM


Birkir's opinion is the most useful and practical explanation of ARIA landmarks I've read to date.
Thank you Birkir!
And, yes, my shop agrees with Birkir.

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Bevi Chagnon, founder/CEO | <EMAIL REMOVED>
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-----Original Message-----
From: WebAIM-Forum < <EMAIL REMOVED> > On Behalf Of Birkir R. Gunnarsson
Sent: Sunday, April 29, 2018 2:10 PM
To: WebAIM Discussion List < <EMAIL REMOVED> >
Subject: Re: [WebAIM] How to handle Heading under Section

My opinion (not hard truth, just opinion) is that ARIA landmarks are most useful when describing visual structure (fixed sections) of the page, whereas headings describe the structure of the content.
so landmarks are highly useful for separateing page header, main body and footer, also useful for marking fixed sections of the page like a stock ticker (complementary) navigation menus (account navigation, left navigation) etc. They are an equivalent to seeing sections of the page at fixed locations on the screen.

I also think landmarks quickly lose their usefulness when you have too many of them, I'd say a rule of thumb should be no more than 5 landmarks for a simple page, maybe 8 for a massive page.

In your case, without seeing the page, I don't think you should assign landmarks to sections of content already identified with headings. It will increase verbosity with very little actual benefit.
a region landmark without a label is not supposed to be a landmark. If a screen reader presents one as such, file an issue with the screen reader vendor.




On 4/29/18, glen walker < <EMAIL REMOVED> > wrote:
> NVDA does let me turn off landscape announcements but it turns it off
> everywhere. I'm not sure if I could turn it off just for a particular
> site. So in theory you could ask your users to change their screen
> reader settings to accommodate your design decisions.
>
>
>
> On Sun, Apr 29, 2018 at 10:17 AM, Jonathan Cohn < <EMAIL REMOVED> >
> wrote:
>
>> On the other hand Screen readers probably could be adjusted so that
>> they would not double speak when the label of the section just
>> entered is the same as the element with virtual focus.
>>
>> -Jonathan
>>
>> Best wishes,
>>
>> Jonathan Cohn
>>
>>
>>
>> > On Apr 29, 2018, at 2:57 AM, glen walker < <EMAIL REMOVED> > wrote:
>> >
>> > A <section>
>> > <https://www.w3.org/TR/html53/sections.html#the-section-
>> element>
>> > element has a region role
>> > <https://www.w3.org/TR/wai-aria-1.1/#region>
>> by
>> > default, and a region is a landmark. While it's good to have
>> > bypass
>> blocks
>> > that a screen reader can use, it might be overkill to have both a
>> > heading and a landmark. The problem is you might have some screen
>> > reader users that like to navigate by headings and others that like
>> > to navigate by landmarks. Hearing the heading twice is not ideal,
>> > but is certainly
>> better
>> > than not being labeled.
>> >
>> > Without knowing more details about your situation, my initial
>> > reaction is that the <section> is not needed. If you can't prevent
>> > the <section>
>> from
>> > being generated, then you might want to consider removing the
>> > landmark
>> role
>> > of the <section>. You can do this two ways:
>> >
>> > 1. If a <section> doesn't have a label (aria-label or
>> > aria-labelledby), then most screen readers ignore the region as a landmark.
>> > 2. You can set role="presentation"
>> >
>> >
>> >
>> > On Sun, Apr 29, 2018 at 12:18 AM, Alexander Karelas <
>> <EMAIL REMOVED> >
>> > wrote:
>> >
>> >> My page has 4 sections.
>> >>
>> >> Each of the 4 sections contains a big heading.
>> >>
>> >> My question is:
>> >>
>> >> Should I label the 4 sections? If so, I would ideally like to
>> >> label them with the 4 headings (with aria-labelledby, maybe).
>> >>
>> >> But when I do that, NVDA reads the heading twice when I press 'h'
>> >> to browse the headings. It reads it once because I entered the
>> >> section, and it reads it once more because it's reading the
>> >> heading itself.
>> >>
>> >> Is that considered annoying? I mean, when the user presses 'h' 4
>> >> times to browse the 4 headings, they will hear each heading twice
>> >> after each keypress.
>> >>
>> >> How do you think I should handle this?
>> >>
>> >> Thank you,
>> >>
>> >>
>> >> >> >> >> >> archives at http://webaim.org/discussion/archives
>> >> >> >>
>> > >> > >> > archives at http://webaim.org/discussion/archives
>> > >>
>> >> >> archives at http://webaim.org/discussion/archives
>> >>
> > > archives at http://webaim.org/discussion/archives
> >


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