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Re: Aria Sliders on Mobile

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From: Bryan Garaventa
Date: Nov 22, 2019 10:42AM

Hi,
That's correct. This component does use role="slider", but it too has to have a mobile fallback for touch devices.
http://whatsock.com/tsg/Coding%20Arena/ARIA%20Sliders/Horizontal/demo.htm

In my last conversation with Apple about this, it is unlikely that role=slider will ever be adequately supported by VoiceOver within web technologies using standard JavaScript for drag and drop slider functionality. To do this, the accessibility API would need the ability to pass events to and from the browser where gestures like the up/down swipe movement would increment or decrement the slider, and there is no way for the platform API to identify what the intended behavior of the JavaScript is meant to be, and simulating this would end up doing nothing as it currently does. This is why the only accessible solution is to provide increment and decrement buttons in addition to the ARIA Slider widget to ensure accessibility across various platforms. In contrast, the slider widget on native iOS apps does work correctly like this, because within X Code there is an API that allows these events to pass back and forth in a manner that can be reliably processed.

In short though, ARIA Sliders using standard JavaScript for drag and drop will likely never work correctly within touch-based platforms unless a dedicated drag and drop API is created to handle this functionality at the platform level. You can read more about the background for this discussion here.
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/important-considerations-regarding-accessible-drag-drop-garaventa/

All the best,
Bryan


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