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Re: The importance of landmarks to screen readers?

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From: Peter Weil
Date: Mar 29, 2021 6:53AM

Yes, the ARIA spec is quite clear about this. And while it does mention that nesting is permissible, examples are few and the implication (as I read it) is that these are probably limited to cases where there are multiple elements with such roles as application, document, and perhaps article(?). I think these kinds of cases are relatively rare, at least in my experience.

As a developer. I work with all kinds of layout designs that do not take landmarks into account and unwittingly imply nested landmarks (that's another discussion), and it can be a challenge to adapt them to a landmarked-based structure. This is the main reason I asked my question.

Regarding discoverability, I'd like to hear more about how or why content within, say, an aside, might be less discoverable if it were at the top level as opposed to be nested. In many cases, visual order or organization is flexible enough via CSS to achieve to decent balance between page structure and visual presentation. Regardless, if faced with a situation where visual design interfered with page structure (i.e., correct landmark usage), I might request more presentation flexibility for accessibility reasons.

Peter

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Peter Weil
Web Developer
University Marketing
University of Wisconsin–Madison



On 3/28/21, 9:21 PM, "WebAIM-Forum" < <EMAIL REMOVED> > wrote:


According to the specification, nesting a complementary landmark inside the main landmark is an ARIA violation because complementary landmarks should be top level landmarks (i.e. not contained within any other landmarks).

https://www.w3.org/TR/wai-aria-1.1/#complementary

https://www.w3.org/TR/wai-aria-practices/examples/landmarks/complementary.html

Steve Green
Managing Director
Test Partners Ltd