jQuery Mobile lists no longer support ARIA / Voiceover

[dhaywood]

As mentioned in this document in StackOverflow ( http://stackoverflow.com/questions/7916052/jquery-mobile-listview-disabled-on-voiceover ), lists in jQuery Mobile no longer provide ARIA / Voiceover support. As the document also suggests, changing the code from:
buttonInner.setAttribute("aria-hidden", "true");
to:
buttonInner.setAttribute("aria-hidden", "false");
in line 6192 of jQuery mobile 1.0 remedies the problem and ARIA Voiceover support for lists is restored.

This was tested using jQuery Mobile 1.0 with jQuery 1.6.4 in Safari 5.1.2.

Fix #2594 ( 1f4d946 ) to prevent button text from being read twice looks like it may be related to disabling of ARIA support for lists.

[jblas]

@uncledean

Have you tried undoing that change? Does it get things working again? Fyi, I changed that code a bit since @Wilto added that int he patch you cited above. Here's the changes I made to that code for 1.0:

86e4e6f#js/jquery.mobile.buttonMarkup.js

I basically DOM-ified the code to speed things up a bit.

[dhaywood]

Hi Kin,

The version of JQM we're running is after the @Wilto version. We're running the official JQM 1.0 final release. "Out of the box" , JQM 1.0 final was setting aria-hidden=true on all lists.

We changed the JQM 1.0 final code (line 6192 in version 1.0) in our local copy to now read...

buttonInner.setAttribute("aria-hidden", "false");

and now lists in our local copy of JQM work with ARIA / Voiceover.

I've attached a screen shot of a section of your code changes. I highlighted in gray the field value in question. In our version, we changed "true" to "false" to prevent ARIA from hiding the buttons / lists.

Thanks,

Dean

[mgifford]

I have confirmed this is an issue and that changing the value to false fixes it. What has to happen to see this in the next release?

[ezufelt]

Confirmed that the problem exists, and tested mgifford's patched version, which fixes the problem. FF8 / JAWS13

[ezufelt]

As this issue makes the list view completely non-functional for some assistive technology users, I would consider it critical. What, if anything, can I do to help move a fix along?

[Wilto]

I’ll take a look at this today. We applied aria-hidden=true to that text because we were injecting more detailed descriptive text for the sake of assistive tech—if that’s no longer happening for some reason, it could be evidence of a larger issue.

[mgifford]

Thanks! Great to hear that there were plans for more descriptive text. I tested in VoiceOver btw.

[Wilto]

Looks like the markup structure had changed after all. aria-hidden="true" was wrapping around both the heading and the additional “click to [expand/collapse]” text—so I’m removing that attribute as we speak. This fix will be in 1.0.1, but no harm in making that change in your 1.0 instances. Thanks guys!

[dhaywood]

Thanks for the rapid correction!