Brad Neuberg has a post up about ARIA on the iPad and some of the tricks he’s used to bend it to his will. Blogger won’t accept my OpenID to comment on the post for some reason so I’ll add some thoughts here.

tabindex

As Brad notes, you can set tabindex=”-1” to prevent an item in HTML from appearing in the tab order. Also as Brad notes, this won’t stop the VoiceOver cursor from moving to that element. It’s important to remember that the VoiceOver cursor is not linked to the keyboard focus, it’s linked to what is being read out to the user. This can be very confusing but it’s an important concept, allowing you to review parts of a document without losing the current caret position where you want to continue editing. Most screen readers seem to have this distinction between the text input focus and the screen reader cursor.

tabindex=”-1” also won’t prevent the user from moving keyboard focus to an element by means other than the tab key. For example, clicking on a textarea will move the keyboard focus to it even if it has a tabindex of -1.

aria-hidden

As a work-around to try and prevent VoiceOver from focusing an element, Brad then added aria-hidden=”true”. To his credit, Brad notes this isn’t a good situation and indeed it’s not. Now we have an element which is available to sighted users, but completely hidden to the screen reader. This is almost never what you want.

If something shouldn’t be a landmark, it probably shouldn’t be a heading element and if it shouldn’t be read by a screen reader it should generally be either not there at all or both aria-hidden=”true” and display:none; That way the element disappears for everyone, not just those using a screen reader.

I’m not quite sure what Brad was trying to achieve so I can’t really suggest the right workaround for his use case but it sounds like there may be a need to go back and get the basic semantics of the HTML right.

aria-labelledby

I’m not entirely sure what Brad’s aiming for here again but it’s a bit unusual to try and add extra audible information to a heading which isn’t available to sighted users. Normally labelledby would be used for form elements to link them with the text that describes what they’re for. My first thought here is to adjust the HTML to make it more semantic rather than trying to fix it up with ARIA. For the example HTML:

<div aria-labelledby="testH1 testH2 testDIV1">
<h1 id="testH1" tabindex="-1">
This is an H1
</h1>
<h2 id="testH2" tabindex="-1">
This is an H2
</h2>
<div id="testDIV1" tabindex="-1">
This is a div
</div>
</div>

I would say the right thing is to not have any ARIA attributes (or tabindex) at all. h1,h2 and div all default to the equivalent of tabindex=”-1” anyway and if a sighted user would see this as two separate headings and a normal paragraph, a screen ready probably should too. If it’s intended to be read as a single sentence then as a signted user, I’d appreciate it being laid out that way.

aria-label

As a side note, aria-lablledby is only one option for adding information and it’s useful if the extra information you need to present is already available in a textual form somewhere on the page. However, if the content isn’t available (for example because it’s using an icon instead of text) you can use aria-label=”The label you want” to directly specify the label text rather than referring to some other HTML element.

More Info?

It would be great to get some better background information on what’s being attempted here so that better solutions could be proposed. Right now it looks a bit like trying to use ARIA to hammer a square peg into a round hole which not surprisingly isn’t a lot of fun and doesn’t work very well.

The bottom line is that ARIA isn’t the answer to accessibility, it’s just a smattering of extra information to help out in complex cases where HTML and JavaScript are being used to create custom widgets. The first and most important tool for creating accessible web pages is still to use appropriate semantic HTML – especially for the “document” parts of a page as opposed to interactive widgets. If that foundation isn’t set, ARIA won’t save you.