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Re: Trying to Understand 2.5.3

for

From: Mallory
Date: Sep 4, 2019 1:11PM

Birkir R. Gunnarsson wrote:
>This SC is new, does not change much for assistive technology users
>and does not address the biggest problem speech recognition users deal
>with in this regard, missing text labels for icon controls.
>This should have been handled by user agents.

I would love user agents to handle this. Maybe Label In Name should have been proposed to the UUAG. Be aware many see speech recognition as nothing more than a convenience for abled people, not assistive technology *coughNuanceCough*

We know in real life that while browsers may take this up within 5 years, Nuance sure won't.

This SC is new but mostly so is one particular problem: we now have a generation of developers doing this sort of thing:

<button type="button" aria-label="You can purchase the new kazoo now for just €9!">
BUY NOW
</button>

In some ways, aria-* is getting developer attention the way alt never did. I see aria-label being thrown all over the place. It's surprisingly popular, and sometimes I see it more than "sr-only" offscreen texts.
In general, devs are going to trigger Label In Name because they did the work of adding some hidden text "for screen readers" and they didn't bother to think about anyone else (and they assumed all screen reader users are totally blind). Having AT work around developers who still don't understand the scope of their job can get you ending up back to when JAWS would see this:

<span>I am label!</span>
<input type="text">

And heuristically see that clearly, the input's accessible name is "I am label!"

Yes, it's hard to teach developers to use labels correctly, but I'm not a fan of some of the hacks on the AT side either. Part of the problem of developers suddenly needing to know all this new ARIA blah-blah is because they *choose* to use ARIA blah-blah instead of semantic HTML (I get that semantic HTML isn't an option for most widgets, but lots of what I audit is forms, nav menus, and articles which could easily be populated with HTML from the late 90's). I'm kinda done with worrying can they handle it? when they seem to have no issue learning the ins and outs of the latest shiny JS framework with that youthful enthousiasm I envy.

Also they tell each other on social media that it's fine to use divs + lots of aria "because the end result is accessible". Fine, then they need to do all the hard work required to do it right. Their choice, their responsibility. That means piling up more guidelines (at least until/unless browsers step in and are able to do an extreme Postel's law).

cheers,
_mallory