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From: Birkir R. Gunnarsson
Date: Wed, Jan 23 2013 3:04PM
Subject: ARIA landmarks, why are they not more descriptive?
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Dear all

Two posts in one day, I know. This won't become the norm.
Recently, as part of accessibility manual testing, I have been
consulting on how best to split websites up into logical regions (of
course together with proper use of headings and skip-to links).
A few of the standard ARIA landmarks are smart, and make good sense to
me. "Main" and "Navigation" definitely.
Others simply don't quite make sense to me, and I have not seen them
implemented consistently across the website that have used them.
"banner" and "complementary info" mainly.
At the same time I am surprised we don't standardize a few landmarks
around use cases that occur almost on every single website.
Such landmarks, as I see them would be:
1. Contact information (address, phone number, social media contacts,
opening hours etc.). I see these nearly everywhere, and I have advised
to create a custom region for this.

2. Comments: This is slightly less used than "contact info", but I
often find that comments do not start with a heading (yes,some can say
bad design I know), and I very often have to scroll with arrow keys to
find them, yet they are extremely common on many websites that allow
user feedback.

3. Actions: This would be a subset of "navigation" but specifically
around a list of actions or operations a user can perform on a
website, less common still, but quite common once a user has logged
into a website (online banking or an online store).

Does anyone agree with me, see other things they wish were a standard
ARIA landmark, or has background information on the development of
these landmarks to explain why "banner" and "complementary info" were
chosen over more content specific varieties?
I thought I was just being daft and the use of these was obvious, but
from my browsing and looking at different sites, I see that clearly I
am not alone in this and it seems "banner" and "complimentary info" is
used somewhat inconsistently.
Given all the discussion around the html5 semantics I thought it'd be
ok to bring this up here.
Again, if anyone reading this was a part of developing the ARIA specs.
I am grateful to you guys, it proves enormously useful in some cases,
and do not take this as any type of bashing.
Cheers
-B

From: Lucy Greco
Date: Wed, Jan 23 2013 3:38PM
Subject: Re: ARIA landmarks, why are they not more descriptive?
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I agree with you
The one problem I see with adding more kinds of landmarks is that currently
screen readers can only move mark to mark and not by kind of mark you might
want. screen readers should add this before we get more kinds of marks I
don't want to add more extraneous types before I can say never show my
Facebook or twitter feeds

From: Rakesh
Date: Mon, Jan 28 2013 10:10AM
Subject: Re: ARIA landmarks, why are they not more descriptive?
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Dear Birkir,
I agree with you for navigation and main content landmarks. Screen
reader users often use various techniques to jump on to the main content
area. Land marks can be one among them. I personally think users
generally dont jump to any other portion of the page such as footer so
the remaining land marks such as contentinfo, complimentary do not make
much sense.
For land marks such as contact address, usually the contact details of
any website will be provided in a separate page so I don't think it make
any difference if we use a land mark for it.
In addition now-a-days every website is coming with links "Share it on
facebook" and "Share it on twitter". Users are also using this feature
quite often. I think it is a better idea to provide a land mark for this
social media section.
Thanks & Regards
Rakesh
www.maxability.co.in

On 1/24/2013 3:34 AM, Birkir R. Gunnarsson wrote:
> Dear all
>
> Two posts in one day, I know. This won't become the norm.
> Recently, as part of accessibility manual testing, I have been
> consulting on how best to split websites up into logical regions (of
> course together with proper use of headings and skip-to links).
> A few of the standard ARIA landmarks are smart, and make good sense to
> me. "Main" and "Navigation" definitely.
> Others simply don't quite make sense to me, and I have not seen them
> implemented consistently across the website that have used them.
> "banner" and "complementary info" mainly.
> At the same time I am surprised we don't standardize a few landmarks
> around use cases that occur almost on every single website.
> Such landmarks, as I see them would be:
> 1. Contact information (address, phone number, social media contacts,
> opening hours etc.). I see these nearly everywhere, and I have advised
> to create a custom region for this.
>
> 2. Comments: This is slightly less used than "contact info", but I
> often find that comments do not start with a heading (yes,some can say
> bad design I know), and I very often have to scroll with arrow keys to
> find them, yet they are extremely common on many websites that allow
> user feedback.
>
> 3. Actions: This would be a subset of "navigation" but specifically
> around a list of actions or operations a user can perform on a
> website, less common still, but quite common once a user has logged
> into a website (online banking or an online store).
>
> Does anyone agree with me, see other things they wish were a standard
> ARIA landmark, or has background information on the development of
> these landmarks to explain why "banner" and "complementary info" were
> chosen over more content specific varieties?
> I thought I was just being daft and the use of these was obvious, but
> from my browsing and looking at different sites, I see that clearly I
> am not alone in this and it seems "banner" and "complimentary info" is
> used somewhat inconsistently.
> Given all the discussion around the html5 semantics I thought it'd be
> ok to bring this up here.
> Again, if anyone reading this was a part of developing the ARIA specs.
> I am grateful to you guys, it proves enormously useful in some cases,
> and do not take this as any type of bashing.
> Cheers
> -B
> > >

From: Dylan Barrell
Date: Mon, Jan 28 2013 2:38PM
Subject: Re: ARIA landmarks, why are they not more descriptive?
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Birkir,

Here is the way that I recommend use of landmarks:

1) role="main" for the main content of the page and the container for the
target of the skip to main content link (1 per page)
2) role="search" for the container of the search form (generally 1 per page
but could be more)
3) role="banner" for the header of the page (1 per page)
4) role="contentinfo" for the footer of the page or the portion of the page
that includes legal and copyright information (0 or 1 per page)
5) role="navigation" for any navigational container (generally more than 1
per page)

Other landmark roles are less common, you could use role="form" on all
forms but this is somewhat redundant in most ATs and role="complementary"
is always going to be somewhat open to interpretation.

--Dylan

From: Henny Swan
Date: Tue, Jan 29 2013 4:25AM
Subject: Re: ARIA landmarks, why are they not more descriptive?
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I agree with Dylan's 5 steps. I'd also consider the following:

1. Place H1 immediately after the start of the 'main' landmark. This means
VoiceOver / iOS devices will read out 'landmark' and the heading together.
VO on iOS doesn't identify the what each landmark is (i.e. 'Landmark
main'), instead it reads 'landmark' and the content directly following the
landmark.

2. If more than one 'navigation' landmark are used per page consider
including ways to uniquely identify them. This could be a heading that
directly follows in the content order i.e. an H2 'Site links' or using
aria-label="Site links"

When implementing landmarks I try to remind myself of two things:

1. An already well structured page has less need for landmarks which are
really there to reach the parts other semantic can't reach.

2. Don't overdo landmarks otherwise what can be a simple page can become
cluttered with signposting making it time consuming to use. Verbosity
can introduce it's own set of issues.

I wrote a post about Usable Landmarks a while ago:
http://www.iheni.com/usable-landmarks-across-desktop-and-mobile/ There's
some good questions and discussion in the comments around the various costs
and benefits of landmarks.

Cheers, Henny





On 28 January 2013 21:38, Dylan Barrell < = EMAIL ADDRESS REMOVED = > wrote:

> Birkir,
>
> Here is the way that I recommend use of landmarks:
>
> 1) role="main" for the main content of the page and the container for the
> target of the skip to main content link (1 per page)
> 2) role="search" for the container of the search form (generally 1 per page
> but could be more)
> 3) role="banner" for the header of the page (1 per page)
> 4) role="contentinfo" for the footer of the page or the portion of the page
> that includes legal and copyright information (0 or 1 per page)
> 5) role="navigation" for any navigational container (generally more than 1
> per page)
>
> Other landmark roles are less common, you could use role="form" on all
> forms but this is somewhat redundant in most ATs and role="complementary"
> is always going to be somewhat open to interpretation.
>
> --Dylan
> > > >



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