I'm adding a blocking modal (ie one that covers the screen and prevents interaction while an API call is processing) to my company's design library.
As part of that, I modified our modal so that clicking on the grey backdrop will NOT hide the blocking modal, but I want to make sure that doesn't violate accessibility guidelines. I haven't been able to find anything online about this. Does anyone know if this this violates accessibility requirements?
Short Answer
The answer is 'it depends'. Basically if the modal is not dismissable in any way it becomes a 'keyboard trap' and so would violate WCAG.
However if you structure it correctly a modal that blocks the page while an API loads is perfectly valid (and can't be dismissed while the page is loading), but there are a few things you need to do to make sure this is accessible.
1. Make sure that when this modal loads, nothing else on the page is focusable.
The biggest issue I see on most modals is that they allow focus outside of them.
You can't just stop users using the tab key as that is not how most screen reader users navigate the page (they use shortcuts for headings (h1-h6), hyperlinks etc.).
For this reason make sure your modal sits outside of your <main> and the hide your <main> and other major landmarks that contain information with aria-hidden="true" and by adding tabindex="-1" to them so nothing is focusable.
Obviously this depends on your document structure so you would need to test it, but a properly structured HTML document will work with the above method.
2. Make sure that a screen reader user knows that the page is busy and something is loading.
There are a couple of ways to do this. The best is to use an aria-live region
Adding aria-live="polite" and aria-busy="true" to the section you are updating is one way (if you are updating one part of the page).
However in your circumstances I would make a section within the modal aria-live="assertive" and not use the aria-busy (as you will be hiding all the content in step 1 so aria-busy would not be applicable).
I would then update the message every second or two for long loads (i.e. 'loading', 'still loading', 'nearly loaded' etc. Or better yet a loading percentage if your script allows.)
Once the page content has loaded, you do not need to say 'loaded' instead make sure you have a heading for the section or page that has a tabindex="-1" added on it that accurately describes the content that has just been loaded in.
Once the load completes, programatically focus this heading and the user will know that the load is complete.
3. Make sure that if the API call fails you feed something meaningful back to screen readers
When your API call fails (notice I said when, not if!) make sure your JavaScript can handle this in a graceful way.
Provide a meaningful message within your modal aria-live region that explains the problem. Try to avoid stating error codes (or keep them short, nothing worse than hearing a 16 digit string on a screen reader for an error code), but instead keep it simple such as 'resource busy, try again later' or 'no data received, please try again' etc.
Within that region I would also add one or two buttons that allow to retry / go back / navigate to a new page depending on what is appropriate for your needs.
4. For long load times, let the user know what is happening.
I covered this in point 2 but just to emphasise it, make sure you feedback to users that things are still loading if there is a long load time by updating your aria-live region.
Nothing worse that wondering if the page has loaded and the developers forgot to tell you.
5. Give the option to cancel an API call so it doesn't become a keyboard trap.
Obviously the big problem with a whole page modal is it is a 'keyboard trap'.
To ensure this isn't an issue make sure you provide a cancel button.
Make sure it is clear that this will cancel the loading of the page, but don't rely on JavaScript alone.
Instead make this a <a> styled like a button that either points to the current page or the previous page (yet again depending on your needs) and add role="button".
Then intercept this click with JavaScript so that it can function like a button.
The reason for this is that when your JavaScript fails (yet again - when, not if) the user still has a way to get to a meaningful page, thus avoiding a keyboard trap.
This is one of the few times you should use an anchor as a button, as a fallback!
By doing this you ensure that the user always has a way to escape the modal.
You may also consider allowing a user to use the Esc key to close / cancel but that is yet again down to you and your circumstances.
Related
I'm curious what's the proper way to push the screen read to read <span>read me on load</span> first (it's in the middle of the html page) when the page is loaded?
Even
role="rude"
doesn't help for some reason.
Thank you.
What you are using is not part of ARIA live regions. You want either role=alert or aria-live=assertive (though in an early draft "assertive" was originally "rude").
Now, that being said, live regions are intended for use on an already-loaded page. If you are making a dialog, then your HTML might look like this:
<div role="alert" aria-live="assertive">
Anything in here will be announced as soon as it changes.
</div>
If you want the dialog to be announced at page load, then consider hiding its contents and then using script to display its contents once the page has finished loading.
If you need to make it announce as soon as the page loads and it is not a dialog, consider moving focus to the element at page load using script. By placing focus, the browser will announce whatever it is.
For this to work, however, you cannot just place focus on a <span> as it is not interactive content. You can make it interactive by adding a tabindex attribute. If you do that, then you will need to add a role describing what the element does (you can use role=region if you are stuck) so that the screen reader can announce what it is instead making the user think she has landed on a control or otherwise expect to be able to take an action.
If you are moving focus to the element for users without screen readers, or if the very first thing the page displays at page load is an alert of some sort, then this should be fine.
However, since you have provided no context and no examples, and given all the ways this can be done that are far worse than doing nothing, please ask yourself this:
Is the thing you want to announce…
…an alert or dialog?
…a control that already can receive keyboard focus?
…going to be given focus for all users, not just those with screen readers?
If you end up saying no twice then you should not do this.
If you can provide an example URL that shows what you want to do, then I am happy to help you get it working. Otherwise I fear you may be coding something that ends up creating a trap or barrier for screen reader users.
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Why are buttons discouraged from navigation?
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From my understanding, buttons are used to carry out functions and links are used to navigate the user to a different page. But what is best practice in terms of opening and closing a modal?
<a id="testModal" href="#">Open Modal</a>
or
<button id="testModal">Open Modal</button>
<button>
Change the <a href="#"> to a <button> and put your event handler on it.
Some more context on which elements belongs where....
Does the Control Take Me to Another Page? Use an Anchor
If, when clicked, tapped, or activated by keyboard or voice (or insert novel interaction method here), the user is whisked to another URL (including an anchor on the same page), then use <a href="[URL]">. Make sure you use the href attribute and that it has a real URL, not a “#” (otherwise you’re probably relying on JavaScript, which is not at all necessary for a hyperlink). If an href points to just a “#”, then you’re probably doing it wrong. If it points to a named anchor as part of your progressive enhancement efforts, then that’s totally valid.
Does the Control Change Something on the Current Page? Use a Button
If, when activated, the user is not moved from the page (or to an anchor within the page), but instead is presented with a new view (message boxes, changes in layout, etc.), then use a <button>. While you could use an<input type="button">, it’s more likely you’ll get into conflicts with pre-existing styles and subsequent developers (like me).
Does the Control Submit Form Fields? Use a Submit
If, when activated, information the user has entered (either by manually typing or by choosing items on the screen) is being sent back to the server, then use an <input type="submit">. This has better live within a <form>. If you need more styling control or have to embed more than just a simple text string, use a <button type="submit"> instead.
Keyboard Considerations
Think of keyboard users for a moment. A hyperlink can be fired by pressing the enter key. But a true button can be fired by pressing the enter key or the space bar. When a hyperlink has focus and the user presses the space bar, the page will scroll one screenful. If there isn’t more to scroll then the user just experiences nothing. Given a set of interface elements that look the same, if some work with a space bar and some don’t, you can’t expect users to have much confidence in how the page behaves.
I think it’s also worth mentioning that events triggered by a space bar only fire when the key is released, whereas using the Enter key will fire the event as soon as you press the key down (prior to releasing it).
I think there are two possible cases.
Your content is only visually hidden in page or visible in page (can be read by screen readers) and can be hash linked, then an anchor tag might be appropriate (this case is not so common, eg: use case is if you are highlighting a paragraph or image on the page as a modal).
In almost all other cases, your modal is loaded on the same page and is in no way navigated using a url link (except through ajax for accessing data possibly, which doesn't count). Hence it is a custom functionality and a button is the appropriate choice.
Sort of by definition, a dialog is something that will pop up over the current window. You're not really leaving the window, it's just temporarily unavailable. Once you're done with the dialog, you typically go back to the window. So in that respect, you don't want to use a link because you're not going to another page. You're doing some action on the current page. Use a button.
When using a screen reader, I will often bring up the list of links (Ins+F7 in JAWS) to see what pages I can link to. I'll also bring up a list of buttons (Ctrl+Ins+B) to see what actions are available on the page. I would expect the action to bring up a modal dialog to be in my button list.
I manage several websites that use a featured article scroller on their homepages, which allows the user to click a forward or back arrow in order to see the next article headline and blurb while remaining on the same page.
I use WAVE's accessibility checker and any sites that have this particular plugin throw an error back because within the code there is an empty link, written as <a href="#">. Is there any way around this? I've defined a title attribute but the # is causing the empty link error to still come up.
Some places I've seen that this is perfectly acceptable and others claim this is a problem. What's the actual answer and potential workaround?
Change the <a href="#"> to a <button> and put your event handler on it.
Some more context on which elements belongs where....
Does the Control Take Me to Another Page? Use an Anchor
If, when clicked, tapped, or activated by keyboard or voice (or insert novel interaction method here), the user is whisked to another URL (including an anchor on the same page), then use <a href="[URL]">. Make sure you use the href attribute and that it has a real URL, not a “#” (otherwise you’re probably relying on JavaScript, which is not at all necessary for a hyperlink). If an href points to just a “#”, then you’re probably doing it wrong. If it points to a named anchor as part of your progressive enhancement efforts, then that’s totally valid.
Does the Control Change Something on the Current Page? Use a Button
If, when activated, the user is not moved from the page (or to an anchor within the page), but instead is presented with a new view (message boxes, changes in layout, etc.), then use a <button>. While you could use an<input type="button">, it’s more likely you’ll get into conflicts with pre-existing styles and subsequent developers (like me).
Does the Control Submit Form Fields? Use a Submit
If, when activated, information the user has entered (either by manually typing or by choosing items on the screen) is being sent back to the server, then use an <input type="submit">. This has better live within a <form>. If you need more styling control or have to embed more than just a simple text string, use a <button type="submit"> instead.
Keyboard Considerations
Think of keyboard users for a moment. A hyperlink can be fired by pressing the enter key. But a true button can be fired by pressing the enter key or the space bar. When a hyperlink has focus and the user presses the space bar, the page will scroll one screenful. If there isn’t more to scroll then the user just experiences nothing. Given a set of interface elements that look the same, if some work with a space bar and some don’t, you can’t expect users to have much confidence in how the page behaves.
I think it’s also worth mentioning that events triggered by a space bar only fire when the key is released, whereas using the Enter key will fire the event as soon as you press the key down (prior to releasing it).
Some source suggests that link would be an invalid hypertext reference, but in fact the problem would exist only in non javascript browsers which is out of the scope of WCAG 2. This is not your problem here as this is not an error that WAVE considers.
The problem here is the fact that you have an empty link content and that adding a title attribute does not satisfy WAVE algorithm.
If your only concern is to satisfy WAVE, just put some content in the link and use any CSS trick to hide this content.
I'm trying to make an existing FLEX application section-508-compliant, by getting it to work smoothly with the JAWS screen reader. It kinda sorta works, but one immediate problem is that when you first go to the login screen, your cursor ends up in the userid field, but JAWS doesn't read anything useful (like the label of the field you're in!) until you hit TAB or something.
Is there a way to force it to speak immediately on application startup, without making the user tab/backtab just to hear where they are?
For that matter, as cool as it is that it reads interactive controls as the user tabs around, sometimes you just need to make JAWS say something at a particular point in the logic, which might or might not be associated with a control, as if you could write AS code like jaws.speak('blah blah blah');. Does anyone know how to accomplish this?
check out the Tips and Tricks slide (page 16) on this page:
http://www.slideshare.net/fugaciousness/accessibility-in-flex
A few in particular you may find usefull...
start the tabIndex at 1 instead of 0.
Force focus into the app with ExternalInterface.call("s = function() {document.getElementByID('"+this.id+"').focus(); }");
Or force the tab to stay within the app... keyFocusChange="event.preventDefault(); focusManager.getNextFocusManagerComponent(event.shiftKey).setFocus()"
Sometimes a user will click on a link on a page, and it seems that there is no reaction -- nothing is loaded. It turns out that all the links on that page is targeting a window name, such as "news_content". The user previously already clicked on a news headline, and so when the user now clicks on another news headline, that window (usually another tab nowadays) will load the news, but the original tab is still the one being shown. To the user, this seems like nothing is happening.
Are those websites using <a href=" ... " target="news_content"> ? Is it a good idea to use something like that, or can it be changed a little bit so that the focus will go to that tab instead of staying at the original tab?
(is it better that the browser always switch to the target tab? if so, then this problem looks like will be solved).
In my opinion the user should always be in control of whether a link opens in a new window or not - If they're anything like me with numerous tabs endless new windows links are a mess.
What you seem to be asking is why the browser stays at the original page when a tab is updated with content, its simple, it sees it as another webpage, say you had a page that had realtime updating, your browser would not switch to that as it sees you are on another page - for all it knows you could be reading an article, watching a video etc.
All it takes to realise a different tab/window has updated is a little bit of awareness. With windows they would generally open over the current content, however as tabs are in one window this is not possible an it remains closed, but updated.
EDIT: In response to the title... I believe it to be better practice than opening something brand new each time however feel it should be the users choice whether to load a single new tab or stay in the same one. Hope this helps.
One caveat to add to the conversation.
I only use target= when I know the content is destined to be in an iframe and I don't want the link click to stay in the small window.
For example the graphs I embed here : http://webnumbr.com/stackoverflow-questions
Link behaviour should generally be left to the user to control. In some situations, a case can be made for target="_blank" (especially now that Firefox, at least, has a "New pages should be opened in: A new tab" option), but setting all links to open in the same new window is just bad.
I, for example, hate waiting for pages to load, so I'll read down a page middle-clicking each link that interests me, which will queue them up in a series of new tabs. Five interesting links become five tabs, each loaded in the background while I'm reading the first article, so no waiting. If you make all five open in the same window/tab, though, then each one disappears when I call up the next and not only do I have to 'pick one, wait for it to load, read it, go back to the original article, repeat', but, if I don't notice that this is what's happening, then I'll also need to go back and make a second pass through the original page to re-find the links to the lost documents (or, more likely, just say "not worth my time" and never read them).
Forcing newly-opened tags to the front has a similar problem: I opened it in a new tab because I want it to load in the background while I continue reading the original document. Don't subvert my intention. I cleared the "When I open a new tab, switch to it immediately" checkbox for a reason.
Yes, these websites are using target. Well. I can't imagine in which set of circumstances using the target attribute may be useful. But perhaps there's one. I haven't come across it.
Look, always switching to another tab solves the problem you describe, but it creates others. The biggest one is that switching to another tab may come as a surprise. Usability is by and large about never surprising the user. By the way, I greatly enjoyed the book "Don't make me think."