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Re: Hidden headings with aria-labelledby or just aria-label best for for labelling landmark regions?

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From: Jonathan Avila
Date: Jul 24, 2018 9:10AM

I'll add to what Steve has said from a US perspective. I agree with all of his comments regarding headings. I also have seen the same challenges with training although in my experience people who have had disabilities for a longer time are more aware of different products and settings then when I started in this field 20 years ago. I have not witnessed the same issue with table navigation that Steve did although I do see people tend to use older less effective commands like the list of links feature to explore a page. Unsurprisingly, people who have more recently acquired a disability in my experience are more likely to not be aware of as many options. It is my experience that many ophthalmologist after determining they can't assist a person is who is loosing vision don't refer the person to services although as Steve points out services and community groups are available to people with disabilities such as those with visual impairment.

In the US many services occur at the state level through the state department of rehabilitation services or it's specific equivalent such as the department for the blind and visually impaired. When I started in this field 20 years ago customers would receive a week or two of training and assistive technology in order to assist them with job placement. At the time government programs such as the CAP program at the Department of Defense offered similar services for participating agencies for Federal employees. In both cases the early 2000s due to budget cuts the level of training that people received dropped to a day or two and the list of assistive technology that would be purchased was constrained. I'm currently not involved with this aspect of service delivery but from what I've heard it is similar now in the very limited scope of what people receive in the form of training. Other organizations exist such as the Lighthouse and similar non-profits to provide services or redu
ced cost services but it is a challenge to reach everyone with the right training and skills people need.

As a side note regarding my comments on the list of links used by screen reader users -- I do find that the list of links is useful if you know the name of the link you are looking for. It can be an effective way to reach something if you know the name. However, if you don't know the name of a link you can spend more time trying to read through the list of links looking for something that could be found easier through navigating the structure of a page. For example, if you were looking for a store locator the link might be sufficiently named "find a store" or "store location" or even "my local store" but those begin with different letters as such if you are trying to navigate by first letter navigation in a list of links you will likely have difficulty. A better way might be to search for the word "store" on the page. In my experience screen readers have also not updated their list of links functionality to support new ways of labeling things such as via aria-describedby and
don't include the current list items, sentence, or table cell information in the list of links. In short, usability testing with users that have disabilities may reveal limitations in access to training, limitations and bugs in assistive technology in addition to bugs or design flaws in a website or application. So understanding and taking action on user findings as Steve points out is a tricky situation. It takes an expert to unpack the findings and figure out the best solution. I'm not blaming users here -- so please don't suggest that -- I'm saying that the challenges are complex in understanding and addressing the issues users with disabilities face in accessing digital content.

Jonathan