Tagged “aria”

At work there are plans afoot to reconcile various differing Autocomplete implementations into a single, reusable component. So far there’s been a written audit presenting all instances and how they differ in functional and technical respects. There’s also been design work to identify visual commonalities and avoid future inconsistencies. I’d now like to add another perspective: an investigation into which HTML materials and (if necessary) ARIA supplements are appropriate to ensure we build something accessible and resilient.

I’ve never properly understood when you would need to use the ARIA presentation role. This is perhaps in part because it is often used inappropriately, for example in situations where aria-hidden would be more appropriate. However I think the penny has finally dropped.

learn about semantic HTML, accessibility, and how using ARIA attributes can sometimes do more harm than good.

I recorded a talk on “Hiding elements on the web” for @freeagent’s tech blog. It’s a tricky #FrontEnd & #a11y topic so I try to cover some good practices and responsible choices. Hope it helps someone. (Also it’s my first video. Lots of room to improve!)

Here’s an accessibility tip that’s new to me. When the content of a heading, anchor, or other semantic HTML element contains smaller “chunks” of span and em (etc), the VoiceOver screen reader on Mac and iOS annoyingly fails to announce the content as a single phrase and instead repeats the parent element’s role for each inner element. We can fix that by adding an inner “wrapper” element inside our parent and giving it role=text.

Unlike other HTML5 elements such as header, footer and nav, it’s never been particularly clear to me when is appropriate to use section. This is due in large part to many experts having expressed that it doesn’t quite work as intended.

Jeremy Keith takes us through his thought process regarding the choice of link or button when planning accessible interactive disclosure elements.

In order to code modern component designs we often need to hide then reveal elements. At other times we want to provide content to one type of user but hide it from another because it’s not relevant to their mode of browsing. In all cases accessibility should be front and centre in our thoughts. Here’s my approach, heavily inspired by Scott O’Hara’s definitive guide Inclusively Hidden.

The aria-label and aria-labelledby attributes do the same thing but in different ways. Sometimes the two attributes are confused and this has unintended results. This post describes the differences between them and how to choose the right one.

Sam Dutton advises how to use cross-platform browser features to build sign-in forms that are secure, accessible and easy to use.

Here’s Dave Rupert, frustratedly rounding up the accessibility shortfalls in browser implementations of native HTML elements.

I’ve always abided in the idea that “HTML is accessible by default and then we come along and mess it up”. But that’s not always the case. There are some cases where even using plain ol’ HTML causes accessibility problems.

The HTML attribute aria-current allows us to indicate the currently active element in a sequence. It’s not only great for accessibility but also doubles as a hook to style that element individually.

A while back I read a great SVG icon tip from Andy Bell which I’d been meaning to try and finally did so today. Andy recommended that for icons with text labels we set the width and height of the icons to 1em since that will size them proportionately to the adjacent text and additionally lets us use font-size to make any further sizing tweaks.