E-mail List Archives

Search E-mail List Archives for

Number of posts in this thread: 11 (In chronological order)

From: David Engebretson Jr
Date: Tue, Jan 01 2019 3:12PM
Subject: most important ARIA
No previous message | Next message →

Happy new year all!

I'm curious what you consider the most important ARIA to learn. Also, do you have reccomendations for novices to ARIA to learn effective techniques with those most important elements of ARIA?

Personally, I am a novice with ARIA, but I enjoy its benefits everyday as a screen reader user. I use multiple screen readers (JAWS, NVDA, Voiceover) and would like to be able to teach my community of web developers how to best use ARIA.

Where would you suggest I go to learn how to explain ARIA to developers who don't benefit from it everyday? Not all of the developers in my community experience the benefits and I want to be able to explain why it is important to implement it into their web page designs.

Thanks so much,
David

From: Brandon Keith Biggs
Date: Tue, Jan 01 2019 4:25PM
Subject: Re: most important ARIA
← Previous message | Next message →

Hello David,
Aria is not something that should be used if there is any other
alternative. It's a last resort.
Thus saying, understanding roles and aria-labeled is the most important,
then being able to do simple widgets like tabs and accordions. The largest
problem with people using Aria, in my experience, is they over-use it. Aria
is not as friendly as HTML. If there is something wrong, the browser and
the screen reader don't figure out what is trying to go on, instead they do
exactly what is said which is a bug to the user.
Inclusive Components is a very good site:
https://inclusive-components.design/
Thanks,

Brandon Keith Biggs <http://brandonkeithbiggs.com/>;


On Tue, Jan 1, 2019 at 2:12 PM David Engebretson Jr <
= EMAIL ADDRESS REMOVED = > wrote:

> Happy new year all!
>
> I'm curious what you consider the most important ARIA to learn. Also, do
> you have reccomendations for novices to ARIA to learn effective techniques
> with those most important elements of ARIA?
>
> Personally, I am a novice with ARIA, but I enjoy its benefits everyday as
> a screen reader user. I use multiple screen readers (JAWS, NVDA,
> Voiceover) and would like to be able to teach my community of web
> developers how to best use ARIA.
>
> Where would you suggest I go to learn how to explain ARIA to developers
> who don't benefit from it everyday? Not all of the developers in my
> community experience the benefits and I want to be able to explain why it
> is important to implement it into their web page designs.
>
> Thanks so much,
> David
> > > > >

From: Patrick H. Lauke
Date: Tue, Jan 01 2019 6:23PM
Subject: Re: most important ARIA
← Previous message | Next message →

On 01/01/2019 22:12, David Engebretson Jr wrote:
[...]
> Where would you suggest I go to learn how to explain ARIA to developers who don't benefit from it everyday? Not all of the developers in my community experience the benefits and I want to be able to explain why it is important to implement it into their web page designs.

It's far from perfect or comprehensive, but I've done some basic intros
to ARIA for devs in the last few months which were generally well
received. Slides here: https://patrickhlauke.github.io/aria/presentation/

P
--
Patrick H. Lauke

www.splintered.co.uk | https://github.com/patrickhlauke
http://flickr.com/photos/redux/ | http://redux.deviantart.com
twitter: @patrick_h_lauke | skype: patrick_h_lauke

From: Jeff Gutsell
Date: Wed, Jan 02 2019 9:32AM
Subject: Re: most important ARIA
← Previous message | Next message →

David,

I love your question. Everyone who cares about Web accessibility should encourage developers to "keep accessibility in mind." I think a lot of developers feel like this a subject that is very time-consuming to master. We can show them that the most important points are not all that difficult.

You should encourage your developers to read the articles at webaim.org and the accessibility overviews at the Mozilla Developers Network.
Just as Brandon said, ARIA should be a last resort in achieving accessibility. These sites do great jobs proving this.

If you have developers who really want to get their hands dirty with some ARIA, I would suggest the "aria-label" and "aria-labeledby" attributes. You could use these to show the importance of learning the ordinary html solutions that should be tried before using them.
I have encountered two developers recently who seem to be much more supportive of following best practices once I persuaded them that most of the basics are not particularly difficult or time-consuming. They do involve being disciplined to stick to some best practices and avoid some old habits.

Jeff Gutsell

From: Bryan Garaventa
Date: Wed, Jan 02 2019 7:02PM
Subject: Re: most important ARIA
← Previous message | Next message →

Hi,
For sighted developers, I strongly recommend everybody use Visual ARIA, which is designed to help teach the use of ARIA to people of all experience levels during standard usage, education, development, and testing with hands on experience.
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/visual-aria-now-allows-anyone-sight-see-how-works-from-garaventa/

This is also downloadable at
https://github.com/accdc/visual-aria

Included within the download is an ARIA 101 roadmap document for learning ARIA as comprehensively as possible starting with no experience in ARIA.

Best wishes,
Bryan



Bryan Garaventa
Principle Accessibility Architect
Level Access, Inc.
= EMAIL ADDRESS REMOVED =
415.624.2709 (o)
www.LevelAccess.com

From: greg jellin
Date: Wed, Jan 02 2019 9:10PM
Subject: Re: most important ARIA
← Previous message | Next message →

Radical, Bryan! This is the first I've heard of your tool. Excited to play
with it tomorrow.

Greg

On Wed, Jan 2, 2019, 6:03 PM Bryan Garaventa <
= EMAIL ADDRESS REMOVED = wrote:

> Hi,
> For sighted developers, I strongly recommend everybody use Visual ARIA,
> which is designed to help teach the use of ARIA to people of all experience
> levels during standard usage, education, development, and testing with
> hands on experience.
>
> https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/visual-aria-now-allows-anyone-sight-see-how-works-from-garaventa/
>
> This is also downloadable at
> https://github.com/accdc/visual-aria
>
> Included within the download is an ARIA 101 roadmap document for learning
> ARIA as comprehensively as possible starting with no experience in ARIA.
>
> Best wishes,
> Bryan
>
>
>
> Bryan Garaventa
> Principle Accessibility Architect
> Level Access, Inc.
> = EMAIL ADDRESS REMOVED =
> 415.624.2709 (o)
> www.LevelAccess.com
>
>

From: Steve Green
Date: Wed, Jan 02 2019 9:53PM
Subject: Re: most important ARIA
← Previous message | Next message →

I have just tried it with Chrome on a few websites and whilst it is useful, you can't always take the results at face value. For instance, one website contained a div element that contained two others that had aria-label attributes. No matter where I hovered the mouse, the Visual ARIA tooltip showed the accessible name as being the concatenation of the two aria-label attributes. Maybe this is the expected behaviour, but I expected to be able to see the accessible names for each div separately.

Another issue is that the tooltip for the accessible name is often very narrow so the accessible name wraps onto multiple lines and is mostly hidden behind the tooltip for the accessible description. It seems that the tooltip is constrained to the width of the container that the target element is in.

I have also just seen the accessible name wrap without going onto a new line, so it overwrites itself and is almost entirely unreadable. It looks like the text in the tooltips is using some of the styles from the target page, which does not seem to be a good idea.

Also, there are no tooltips when I hover over a native combobox, even if it has an accessible name. Is this expected?

All these issues and more can be seen if you use Visual ARIA on https://www.jackwills.com/sale-and-offers/ladies/sale-hoodies/. The accessibility of the entire website is terrible so it's a good one to use for evaluating accessibility testing tools.

Steve Green
Managing Director
Test Partners Ltd

From: David Engebretson Jr
Date: Thu, Jan 03 2019 1:54PM
Subject: Re: most important ARIA
← Previous message | Next message →

Thanks Bryan,

Is the Visual ARIA tool also accessible to screen reader users?

Best,
David

From: mhysnm1964
Date: Thu, Jan 03 2019 4:42PM
Subject: Re: most important ARIA
← Previous message | Next message →

Question, this tool I assume does not work with a screen reader?

From: Bryan Garaventa
Date: Fri, Jan 04 2019 12:53PM
Subject: Re: most important ARIA
← Previous message | Next message →

Hi,
I am actually blind myself, and I built this mainly to address the issue where sighted developers were misapplying ARIA in ways that were detrimental to screen reader support. E.G such as adding aria-hidden="true" on site regions and various ARIA role usage, so it visually represents what happens when ARIA is used and offers incremental guidance for developers during the agile development stages so they can learn from experience as they go.

Still though, the tooltips can be read in Firefox using JAWS, but Visual ARIA is indeed primarily meant for sighted devs to understand ARIA compliance when they have little to no experience with screen readers.

In contrast, to address the more integrated issue such as 'what to expect' when using a screen reader while running properly coded ARIA widgets that conform to all of these criteria, I created the test page at:
https://www.levelaccess.com/aria-widget-checklist-screen-reader-testing/
Which is often helpful when looking at comparison analysis between related widget constructs.

Then it's easier to ask the question 'why does it work here' when it doesn't work there? Often reverse engineering the roles and focus usage will provide some pretty definitive results as to why this is happening, and typically it has nothing to do with ARIA support.

All the best,
Bryan



Bryan Garaventa
Principle Accessibility Architect
Level Access, Inc.
= EMAIL ADDRESS REMOVED =
415.624.2709 (o)
www.LevelAccess.com

From: Bryan Garaventa
Date: Fri, Jan 04 2019 1:22PM
Subject: Re: most important ARIA
← Previous message | No next message

Hi,
It's important to keep in mind that Visual ARIA is a teaching tool, not a testing tool. So if you try to break it, you will likely succeed.

When building it, I had to balance many different concepts, and ARIA not being simple is one of them. There are many rules and criteria, and including which ones had to be balanced by applying flexible low-overhead messages that would try to show up as well as possible within reason, and 100% success is an impossible goal post if this is what you expect to see on all pages.

The best environment for using Visual ARIA is within the development process, where people can experiment with ARIA usage in a controlled environment and then use the feedback from Visual ARIA while interacting with it to positively shape accessible widget construction in practice.

As an example, when building the accessible React integration project at
https://github.com/whatsock/bootstrap-react
I included Visual ARIA as an offline import that loads in a dormant state so it can be toggled on and off during development by those wishing to do exactly that.

The AccName computation is a work in progress, and this will be changing in the future as I edit the AccName spec to address issues raised in the 1.2 update for
http://www.w3.org/TR/accname-1.1/
So Visual ARIA will be updated accordingly as I do that, but even so, this is meant only as an approximation since the critical aspects of AccName are meant for the browser venders to implement at an algorithm level, and the act of rendering anything within a webpage changes the accessible names of those controls.

It's not possible to expect perfect tooltip rendering on all sites with Visual ARIA, because as part of balancing rules versus UI in creating it, it must borrow from the parent site to display using certain visual rules. Otherwise, individual class overrides would have to be created on everything to account for all possible CSS rule varients and that would inflate the code so much that it wouldn't be usable publically. At present there are over 150 thousand lines of code already. You are welcome to download the source code and check this out to see what I mean.

So even so, I still recommend that all sighted developers use Visual ARIA because it will significantly improve the output of those building interactive ARIA widgets for public consumption.

All the best,
Bryan



Bryan Garaventa
Principle Accessibility Architect
Level Access, Inc.
= EMAIL ADDRESS REMOVED =
415.624.2709 (o)
www.LevelAccess.com