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Re: Is generated content reliably read by screen readers today?

for

From: glen walker
Date: Nov 23, 2018 11:22AM

Birkir said what I was going to say, namely that the accessible name
calculation specifically says the CSS content should be included. Step
2.F.ii (https://www.w3.org/TR/accname-1.1/#step2).

The fact that IE violates the spec is not necessarily a reason to not rely
on it. It just adds another situation where you have to decide if writing
your code to spec is good enough and if a situation doesn't work, then you
put the onus on the user agent to fix it. Or should you code around the
issue to make up for the shortcoming of the browser.

I agree with Steve's comment that if the user turns off style sheets, if
there is not a fall-back method, then this might cause a problem. But I
suspect there will be other problems with the page when stylesheets are
turned off so you'd probably have several things to fix.

And lastly, the case where a user has overridden style sheets, that's a bit
of a stretch. It's not a stretch to have a custom style sheet, but it's a
stretch that the custom style sheet would interfere with the content CSS
property. I have custom style sheets myself and they either augment or
replace a property. I have my own focus indicator for all elements so that
overwrites everything. I suppose if a style sheet has a content attribute
to add a "link opens in a new window" text to links, and I override the
style sheet with my own link styling and replace, rather than augment, then
yes, it could be a problem.

However, with all that being said, the content property of CSS is a weird
one because it's "content" and not styling. If you want to separate
content from styling, then the style sheet should only have styling
information and the page itself should have the content. That would be my
main argument for not using CSS content.

Glen