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Re: Visibly hidden headings to label regions and landmarks

for

From: Max Starkenburg
Date: Sep 2, 2020 9:58AM

During a recent code review of a site change I was making, in which I was
trying to replace a use of a visually-hidden span used to label a region
via aria-labelledby (as presumably unnecessarily complex / redundant) with
aria-label, the reviewer brought up this article indicating that aria-label
values can get lost in translation
<https://adrianroselli.com/2019/11/aria-label-does-not-translate.html>
(whether when sending text to be translated or also by automatic browser
translation tools). Even though we don't translate the sites we work on, I
guess I wasn't feeling like put up much of a fight to avoid
the noise/redundancy others have mentioned in this thread (less justified
in our particular case, being in a span instead of heading), and could
concede that we do have many international students, some of whom might
possibly use automated translation tools on our sites.

Also putting this out there, for whatever it's worth: it seems that at
least some browser and screen reader combos, when navigating by heading,
will also announce to the user when they are newly entering or exiting
regions, so some users primarily navigating by headings (instead of
arrowing) might still get some noisy redundancy if a page has
visually-hidden headings in combination with aria-labelledby (e.g. I can
hear "entering *Site Menu* navigation, heading level two *Site Menu*" on a
page with such markup, in Edge with JAWS, though that admittedly doesn't
seem to be a commonly used combo).

Max
--
Maxwell M. Starkenburg
<EMAIL REMOVED>
https://maxwell.fyi


On Tue, Sep 1, 2020 at 8:37 PM David Engebretson Jr. <
<EMAIL REMOVED> > wrote:

> I think using region naming and a visibly hidden heading directly after
> the region naming as a great way to make sure that folks who navigate by
> headings, and folks who navigate by regions, will get equal structural
> information as to the regions that make up the web page.
>
> It might be "noisy" to a screen reader user who is navigating by arrow
> keys but I don't think, and the screen reader survey seems to agree
> statistically, that all screen reader users navigate pages in the same way.
> Personally I know that regions should give me a quick glimpse of the visual
> sections of the page and headings should give me context to the textual
> content of the page, but I don't think most of us screen reader users are
> as savvy as those of us in the web accessibility field.
>
> The more opportunity for equal access the better, in my opinion.
>
> Best,
> David
>
>