WebAIM - Web Accessibility In Mind

E-mail List Archives

Re: Financial Information Forum, Icons Not Links

for

From: glen walker
Date: Apr 7, 2023 12:31PM

I looked at https://www.draft2digital.com/register/ and
https://press.barnesandnoble.com/create-account. You mentioned the
registration process so I was guessing you meant those two pages.

I see that draft2digital has inaccessible (via the keyboard) tooltip icons
for some of the fields. Is that what you are referring to when you say the
website is using icons? The icons are images nested in label elements and
the images don't have alt text. It's a bit odd that both firefox and chrome
are not announcing the unlabeled image when I navigate to them with the
down arrow key in NVDA and JAWS. I thought the src attribute might be
announced but it's completely silent. If I navigate with the G key to go to
the next graphic, it's skipped over as if it has a blank alt attribute or
aria-hidden (but it doesn't).

I couldn't find a way to get NVDA or JAWS to read the tooltip text. At one
point, the screen reader on chrome told me "To get missing image
descriptions, open the context menu.". So I tried the context menu and
there was a "Get image descriptions from Google" in the context menu so I
selected "Just once". After that, JAWS (but not NVDA) would let me
navigate to the image and it would say "question mark icon graphic". I
still couldn't get the actual tooltip text.

Interesting side note. In the footer of the draft2digital, there are social
media icons. They all use a font-awesome icon but the icons have
aria-hidden set so they're all skipped over and ignored by the screen
reader, except the tiktok icon, which has an image nested in the icon. The
icon does not have aria-hidden and the image has alt text so it's announced
properly.

I didn't find any icons on the Barnes and Noble registration page.