Open chlane opened 2 years ago
Why should a dialogue be modal for non-sighted and non-modal for sighted? The user experience should be the same for everyone.
A similar example would be a text that sighted users can read but that is marked with aria-hidden=true so that blind people cannot read it. That would also be a hard problem
@JAWS-test thank you I completely agree. In this case it seems like the team I was advising thought the interaction they created provided great usability for sighted mouse users with no harm to screen reader users. The interaction can be seen at https://angular.clarity.design/documentation/datagrid/detail-pane. They make a pane show up in a grid. I advised them to use a modal, but that idea was rejected so I recommended to use aria-modal="true" as part of the implementation despite the fact that the everything outside the dialog is not inert when this pane appears. I did this to ensure screen reader users could make sense of this interaction. But in this case screen reader users can't multitask like sighted mouse users can and I have been unable to present an argument as to why sighted mouser users need to be restricted to working with the dialog in this case.
An example case where this could be problematic for AT users is if the "close" button for a dialog was outside the element with aria-modal=true
Thanks @cookiecrook I think that helps. What about cases where AT users can access all the controls they need for a given interaction within the dialog?
The following note on https://www.w3.org/TR/wai-aria-practices-1.1/ mentions severe negative ramifications of aria-modal misuse.
"Because marking a dialog modal by setting aria-modal to true can prevent users of some assistive technologies from perceiving content outside the dialog, users of those technologies will experience severe negative ramifications if a dialog is marked modal but does not behave as a modal for other users. So, mark a dialog modal only when both:
I found this note hard to enforce because I could not articulate the severe negative ramifications of aria-modal misuse with an example.
I work with a team that has created a modal user experience for non-sighted screen reader users and a non modal experience for sighted mouse users by using aria-modal="true" without preventing mouse usage outside of the dialog and without visually obscuring the content outside of the dialog.
I think an example(s) will educate me and help demonstrate why this should not be done.