aria-details: Navigation to descriptive or related content on a page

• When a string is not a sufficient description of an image, the aria-details property is designed to provide a reference to another section of the current document to provide more information about an image.
• aria-details was added to ARIA 1.0 at the request of the DPUB accessibility working group that needed a way for assistive technologies to provide navigation to more robust descriptions of images than can be communicated through simple strings of text (e.g. accessible description on previous slide).
• The major issue with aria-details for the web is the poor assistive technology support within popular screen readers for Windows and macOS. Most screen readers ignore it or at best announce a description is available, but provides no information on the location on the page or a way to navigate to the content.
• Assistive technology support may improve with the implementation of ARIA 1.3 and the new attributes related to annotating online documents. For example, online tools like Google documents will support the annotation attributes and these new attributes will use aria-details attribute as way to reference the annotation information.