WebAIM - Web Accessibility In Mind

E-mail List Archives

for

From: Steve Green
Date: Aug 5, 2025 4:04AM

Hi Laura, I see that "ignored: Yes (default)" in Safari when the parent element is a button, and VoiceOver does indeed ignore the heading. This follows the ARIA specification. JAWS ignores it too. NVDA doesn't, but that's ok because the requirement is a "should".

The ARIA specification says that the link role does not have "Children Presentational: True", which is why VoiceOver announces both the link and the heading. I still don't understand why JAWS and NVDA don't, because both of them expose the heading in the accessibility tree regardless of whether the parent is a link or a button. It looks like JAWS and NVDA are making the decision not to announce the heading, not the browser.

I didn't write this code and wouldn't have done - I am just investigating problems screen reader users have reported with a large e-commerce website. The organisation say they did a WCAG audit and tested with VoiceOver on macOS, but JAWS and NVDA users are getting a different and much worse user experience. A fix would be trivially easy - they just need to remove the "aria-label" attributes - but it's usually all but impossible to get large organisations like this to make even the simplest of changes when they can hide behind a test report that says everything is ok.

Steve