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From: Sailesh Panchang
Date: Aug 5, 2025 7:02AM

The accessible name for the link can be derived from the link's content.
But as we know the aria-label overrides that so I believe the SR does not
have to look at the link's content and expose that to the user. Else what
is the point of the aria-label taking precedence?
If the anchor's content be it a heading or a data table is what needs to be
available to the user, then inserting an aria-label is plain wrong.
Alright, just because "any HTML flow content inside a link" is valid, it
does not mean one needs to do that unless it serves a usable purpose.
An anchor tag (with an href) is meant to serve as a link, which when
activated will bring up the content of the relevant URI. That purpose
available as the link's name needs to be clear to everyone. It needs to
pass SC 2.4.4.
Thanks
Sailesh Panchang

Email: <EMAIL REMOVED>
Deque Systems Inc | - Accessibility for Good | www.deque.com














On Tue, Aug 5, 2025 at 6:04 AM Steve Green via WebAIM-Forum <
<EMAIL REMOVED> > wrote:

> 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
>