WebAIM - Web Accessibility In Mind

E-mail List Archives

Placeholder and Accessible Name Computation

for

From: Steve Green
Date: May 8, 2019 12:16PM

Chrome's browser developer tools contain an Accessibility tab that calculates the accessible name. That can be very helpful when testing convoluted code you didn't write yourself, but the computation appears to contain an error insofar as it uses the "placeholder" attribute.

Bryan Garaventa's tool https://whatsock.github.io/w3c-alternative-text-computation/Editable%20Live%20Input%20AccName%20Test.html does not use the "placeholder" attribute, and since he was an author of the Accessible Name and Description Computation 1.1 I am inclined to trust his implementation rather than Chrome's.

It seems that the computation rules are ambiguous when they say "Otherwise, if the current node's native markup provides an attribute (e.g. title) or element (e.g. HTML label) that defines a text alternative, return that alternative in the form of a flat string". Chrome is interpreting the "placeholder" attribute as a text alternative but Bryan's tool isn't.

Any thoughts on this?

Regards,
Steve Green
Managing Director
Test Partners Ltd
020 3002 4176 (direct)
0800 612 2780 (switchboard)
07957 246 276 (mobile)
020 7692 5517 (fax)
Skype: testpartners
<EMAIL REMOVED>
www.testpartners.co.uk
 
Connect to me on LinkedIn - http://uk.linkedin.com/in/stevegreen2