Edge's screen reader skips alerts

[xmedr]

By default, Microsoft Edge's screen reader "Read Aloud" seems to skip directly to the main content of the page and does not provide any settings to prevent this.

From this comment on the main a11y improvements branch:

Should these alerts be read first before the site's main content? I think that would be useful in scenarios where we experience technical issues but have important announcements/workarounds through the alerts. Would it be possible to do this? Would there be issues or disadvantages to having the alerts always be selected/read first?

[xmedr]

It's definitely important to read alerts in all contexts. We can adjust the structure of the base template to have the alerts inside of the main tag, wrap the rest of the body inside a tag with an id like content, and change the target of the "skip to main content" button to skip to that new body instead. Then we can test whether Edge snaps to the outer main tag, or the inner content.