Basic ARIA landmark roles are not recognized by screen readers

4
votes

I'm researching the implementation of ARIA with HTML5 and have built a tech demo on my localhost to manage scope before exporting to a production website.

I tested using IE11/Firefox 23 and Jaws 15/Fangs - Firefox Add-in, after adding landmark roles to HTML5 tags.

None of the above mentioned browser/screen reader combinations recognize ARIA roles or landmarks (i.e. no change in how the page was announced before/after role attributes were added to existing tags).

The code I am testing with:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>  
   <head>
       <title>ARIA Test</title>
   </head>
   <body role="document">
       <div role="banner"> Hello world!</div>
       <div role="main">Greetings Earth!</div>
   </body>
</html>

Does anyone have any recommendation for triggering ARIA roles in screen readers?

1
htmlaccessibilitywai-aria
ARIA landmark roles are primarily navigation mechanisms that are listed and traversed through shortcut keys (semicolon and shift+semicolon in JAWS), so screen readers may not announce them. – ckundo

1 Answers

5
votes

First - remove role of document, that is essentially the default for HTML docs, so only needed when you've used a role of application.

Secondly, I would test with a more common set of user-agents, e.g. NVDA with Firefox or Jaws with IE.

The most common screen readers (by usage) have supported landmarks for quite a while.

From an article in 2011, HTML5 Accessibility Chops: ARIA landmark support:

  • NVDA and JAWS when using Internet Explorer 9 or Firefox 3+.
  • VoiceOver when using Safari on iOS 4+
  • Orca (Linux screen reader) using Firefox 3+ supports landmarks (not tested).

The article also shows the keyboard shortcuts to test for support.