12.5 Left and Right-pointing arrows are focusable but nothing is announced to the user (H)

Left and right directional arrows highlighted on Home page

FIGURE 12.8: Left and right directional arrows highlighted on Home page

12.5.1 WCAG 1.1.1 (A), 2.4.4 (A), 2.4.6 (AA), 4.1.3 (AA), 4.1.2 (A) - iPad

When navigating the Home page on an iPad with VoiceOver activated, the left and right-pointing directional arrows to allow users to see more items in the gallery within the ‘Heart of the city’ and ‘Get the latest’ sections are focusable, but nothing is announced to the user.

Furthermore, when the user double-taps the arrow icons, more articles are presented to the user, but nothing is announced by VoiceOver.

12.5.2 Recommendation

Ensure non-text elements have an accessible label. E.g. The right-pointing arrow could have the label ‘Next article, button’ and the left-pointing arrow could be ‘previous article, button’.

When new content appears on screen, dynamic content must be communicated to screen reader users.

Depending on the context and importance of the dynamic content on screen, the information can be indicated by using aria live region settings aria-live=‘assertive’, aria-live="polite" or role=“alert”. The purpose of this ARIA content is to notify assistive technologies that a change has occurred and not have users assume that the form is not functioning correctly.

In this instance, aria-live="polite" is recommended as it will notify users of updates but generally won’t interrupt the current task. For reference, both role=alert and assertive will immediately notify the user, and could potentially clear the speech queue of previous updates.