2019-10-24-Scott_O_Hara-HTML_is_accessible_by_default.md

HTML is accessible by default, right?

Speaker: Scott O'Hara
Twitter: @scottohara
Slides: https://scottaohara.github.io/talks_and_such/a11yTO-2019/

1. ARIA

• https://www.w3.org/TR/core-aam-1.1/
• http://w3c.github.io/test-results/core-aam/
• Accessibility Tree

2. CSS Provides skin deep semantics

Sometimes CSS + HTML = semantics

Examples:

- Responsive Tables.
- List styles (ol & ul are announced the same way)
- Css visibility: hidden and display: none, remove elements from semantics
- Display: contents (removes all the a11y mappings assigned to it)

3. HTML

Semantics, are really important for developers and robots that browse the site

Link

<a href="….">
You can't truly transform an anchor link into a button, without a lot of changes. For instance, there are difference when you Right Click in a button or a link.

You need to override the accessibility map of the link.

Images

<img src="…." alt="…."/>
You can't undo an image.
You could add a role via ARIA, however it's not the most accurate way. It doesn't translate well.

Conditional Semantics

• <section>
• <header>
• <footer>

All of these have the same semantics as a <div>

Sections should always have a role and label, watch out, it creates a landmark, we don't want to many landmarks messing with the landmark navigation.

Undead Semantics

• <menu>
• <hgroup>

<menu> is no longer being supported by Browsers as spected. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/menu#Browser_compatibility

4. Semantic "accessible html" can be misused to make inaccessible user experiences

• Title attribute.
• Be careful with autofocus and focus traps.
• Video autoplay is a no-no, browser like safari and chrome have removed it.
• Anchor tag that wraps highly structured content.

What do we do?

• We teach and write
• We can get involved in writing standards
• We can report bugs, and call BS that don't match reality