WebAIM - Web Accessibility In Mind

E-mail List Archives

Re: Trying to Understand 2.5.3

for

From: Mallory
Date: Sep 3, 2019 11:09AM

On Tue, Sep 3, 2019, at 6:48 PM, Patrick H. Lauke wrote:
> Failing to see though how you'd solve this, other than what, mandating
> that all controls must have a visible text label, which won't fly (maybe
> as a triple-A SC, at a stretch)?

I would LUV if this were taken up by browsers. Make it a user setting to show text labels visibly if they exist. No idea how browsers would implement this, unless they simply exposed whatever the computed accessible name of all controls was in a little overlay rather than attempting to find hidden names like stuff in "sr-only" classes.

Developers could do this by hand, similar to how they can deal with users wanting to reduce/remove animations due to a setting (using JS and CSS as we did before prefers-reduced-motion ever was a thing), though it would be a pain. Gmail, for example, mostly does this (with many exceptions): you can choose if you want hieroglyphic buttons, hieroglyphs+text, or text-only.

The fact that visual designers may cry out "oh noes, our precious precious heiroglyphic beauty is befouled with hideous unclean texts!" could make it a AAA, sure. But reducing nausea-inducing animations is also AAA so...

cheers,
_mallory