Accessible Description Calculation

  • Section 5: Providing Accessible Names and Descriptions
  • Accessible description is a string that provides more information about a image, form control, link or ARIA widget.
  • Screen readers each have their own ways of rendering and sometimes ignoring the description information information.

Accessible Description Techniques

Priority Technique Description
1 aria-describedby
  • Creates a string description of an item on the web page, typically called the Accessible Description in the accessibility API.
  • The aria-describedby attribute contains a list of IDREFs to elements on the page.
  • Text content of referenced elements are concatenated to compute the accessible description.
  • Designed to reference visible text on the screen, like instructions and error feedback.
2 title
  • Creates a string description of an item on the web page, typically called the Accessible Description in the accessibility API.
  • If no other source of an accessible description is found and the element has a title attribute that is not being used to define an accessible name, the content of the title attribute is used to define the accessible description.
ARIA 1.3 (future) aria-description
  • Similar to aria-label attribute, text content is used to define an accessible description.
  • The aria-description attribute is in the current editors working draft for ARIA 1.3.