[whatwg] [HTML5] Accessibility question
Henri Sivonen
hsivonen at iki.fi
Mon Mar 31 03:46:46 PDT 2008
On Mar 31, 2008, at 08:10, Nicholas C. Zakas wrote:
> @irrelevant is virtually indistinguishable from setting content to
> display: none. My point in bringing up accessibility with a possible
> attribute or element is to figure out where the lines between HTML
> and CSS are, as it appears HTML 5 has muddied the water. As I stated
> earlier on this list, if something is truly "irrelevant", then it's
> not included in the page. Something that's on the page and hidden is
> relevant, just perhaps not at the current time, which led to the
> suggestion on this list to rename the attribute "ignore".
I agree that the semantic fig leaf is confusing. It means
"hidden" (from all interaction modes).
> I understand your point about superfluity being defined by the
> presentation (one could argue the same about relevance...). Aural
> CSS seemed, at one point, like it would make sense for handling such
> issues. However, since screen readers read the "screen" media
> styles, it doesn't really help.
More to the point, it is unreasonable to expect casual authors to
supply sensible aural CSS even if it were supported.
> I still feel like it's a good idea to have an optional attribute on
> each element that indicates the element's content should not be
> ignored by screen readers regardless of the style applied. Perhaps
> this could be better handled by an ARIA role...
As currently drafted, ARIA has aria-hidden, which is essentially a
less elegant duplicate of HTML5 'irrelevant'. As far as I can tell,
ARIA doesn't specify aria-hidden=false as overriding display: none; in
accessibility API exposure. (But then in general, ARIA doesn't specify
processing requirements in the way we expect from HTML5.)
--
Henri Sivonen
hsivonen at iki.fi
http://hsivonen.iki.fi/
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