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Re: expectations role=group / role=region

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From: Bryan Garaventa
Date: Apr 4, 2022 1:07PM

That's true.

The biggest problem, as I see it, is that the majority of screen reader users will never do this because they assume that the greatest level of accessibility is enabled by default, which in this case it is not.

In the case of named regions, there are many things you can use these for that go beyond what the ARIA spec documents, all of which add rich accessibility support for these widget types. That is, if users are ever aware of these because most will not be now.

Besides accordions, here are several others which you can test with named regions enabled to see what I mean.

Carousels: https://whatsock.com/Templates/Carousels/AutoRotate/index.htm
Popups: https://whatsock.com/Templates/Popups/Internal/index.htm
Tooltips: https://whatsock.com/Templates/Tooltips/Internal/index.htm

All of these widget types benefit from detailed region boundary information, which are explicitly provided as named regions. Otherwise there is no way to identify where the widget or dynamic content regions begin and end.

It is no wonder why landmark regions are declining in the WebAim survey if standard users are never even made aware that these sections even exist during standard navigation.

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

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From: WebAIM-Forum < <EMAIL REMOVED> > On Behalf Of glen walker
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Subject: Re: [WebAIM] expectations role=group / role=region

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All good info so far. Another option, instead of changing the JAWS verbosity level to high is to adjust the medium (default) verbosity level to include named regions.

Bring up the settings center and expand the "Web / HTML / PDFs" branch (the 2nd one in the tree), and then the "Reading" sub-branch (frst one), and then "Configure Web Verbosity Levels", and then "Medium".

The "Announce Start and End For" list has regions (generically, meaning landmarks), near the bottom with various landmark types. Region is one of the types and is unchecked by default for medium verbosity. It's checked for high verbosity. So you could turn it on for medium if you wanted to.

For sighted JAWS users, here are two screenshots as described above. The first is the setting center with "medium" verbosity selected. The second is the list of verbosity elements that can be announced, with Region highlighted near the bottom.

[image: image.png]
[image: image.png]