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Re: Alt-text vs. Aria

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From: Jeremy Echols
Date: Apr 2, 2019 8:32AM

On point 1: I've seen sites where aria is used to set labels, but because devs never see or hear the aria labels, they get out of sync or copied and pasted. E.g., a form field has a placeholder of "search" but the aria label, due to a copy/paste error, says "user name". In the interest of making a design work, there's no proper label tag, and the aria label causes the field to make little or no sense.

On point 2: Typically a link doesn't have alt text, so I'm not sure to what you're referring. Is the link's text different for screen reader users than sighted users? This may be a red flag if so. Also, depending on the situation, having complex screen-reader-only text on a link can be extremely cumbersome. Additionally, if the site is using a custom widget that HTML doesn't provide, ARIA is the way to go. Menus and submenus have ARIA support if you build them with good JavaScript, as I recall, but that requires conforming to certain standards so that when the screen reader announces a thing is a menu, the user knows which keys activate which functionality. If it's all standard, you don't really need any explanatory text so long as ARIA and JS are built properly. For instance, I'm a fan of the approach detailed on the W3C site: https://www.w3.org/TR/wai-aria-practices-1.1/examples/menubar/menubar-1/menubar-1.html