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Re: most important ARIA

for

From: Bryan Garaventa
Date: Jan 4, 2019 12:53PM

Hi,
I am actually blind myself, and I built this mainly to address the issue where sighted developers were misapplying ARIA in ways that were detrimental to screen reader support. E.G such as adding aria-hidden="true" on site regions and various ARIA role usage, so it visually represents what happens when ARIA is used and offers incremental guidance for developers during the agile development stages so they can learn from experience as they go.

Still though, the tooltips can be read in Firefox using JAWS, but Visual ARIA is indeed primarily meant for sighted devs to understand ARIA compliance when they have little to no experience with screen readers.

In contrast, to address the more integrated issue such as 'what to expect' when using a screen reader while running properly coded ARIA widgets that conform to all of these criteria, I created the test page at:
https://www.levelaccess.com/aria-widget-checklist-screen-reader-testing/
Which is often helpful when looking at comparison analysis between related widget constructs.

Then it's easier to ask the question 'why does it work here' when it doesn't work there? Often reverse engineering the roles and focus usage will provide some pretty definitive results as to why this is happening, and typically it has nothing to do with ARIA support.

All the best,
Bryan



Bryan Garaventa
Principle Accessibility Architect
Level Access, Inc.
<EMAIL REMOVED>
415.624.2709 (o)
www.LevelAccess.com