Forum Discussion
Best practices for making accessible select to reveal interactions.
I would go with layer based or state based and perhaps a combination of alt text based.
Layers are probably the easiest as long as you get the focus order correct, think it through in a logical order helps.
Hidden state is not visible to a screen reader, but would be when turned to any other state, again getting the focus order correct will help so that the object that changes it to normal is before the object that changes from hidden.
Each state can have individual alt text.
I often use alt text to give additional information to the user that would benefit from it if they are using a screen reader, although have never used it how you describe, I think it may be confusing as if there is a trigger attached the object will be called out as a button. The first two options you describe would be my goto, and I would use elements of the third but sparingly.
Thanks for the feedback, Phil.
Your comment about the states having individual alt text got me thinking.
Could you have a single "reveal-able" element with multiple states that get displayed. Does the Focus Order dialog allow you to focus on an element multiple times?
For example:
User tabs to and selects button 1 - reveal item state 1 is shown - tabbing focuses onto reveal item
User tabs to and selects button 2 - reveal item state 2 is shown - tabbing focuses BACK onto this reveal item with the new state
I may have to experiment with this. Unfortunately I don't think using this approach would work well if you can't include the reveal-able multiple times as the user would have to tab through all the buttons to get to each "reveal"
I only have NVDA installed, so I would be curious how JAWS handles this sort of thing.