Screen readers

Most of the time, tooltips shouldn’t be needed if you provide clear textual labeling and familiar iconography. Most of the time toggletips are a complex way of providing information that could just be part of the document’s prose content. But I see each of these components all the time in auditing websites, so I wanted to provide some guidance on how to make the most of them.

Checklist

• If you have space, don’t use tooltips or toggletips. Just provide clear labels and sufficient body text.
• If it’s a tooltip you are looking to use, decide whether the tip’s content should be provided as the label or description and choose ARIA properties accordingly.
• Don’t rely on title attributes. They are not keyboard accessible and are not supported in many screen reader setups.
• Don’t describe toggletips with aria-describedby. It makes the subject button non-functional to screen reader users.
• Don’t put interactive content such as close and confirm buttons or links in tooltips or toggletips. This is the job of more complex menu and dialog components.

We’ve been working with SVGs a lot recently, which has led our developers down a rabbithole of discovery! Here are some things to consider when it comes to SVGs and accessibility.

[…]

1. <img> tags and SVGs

When SVGs are implemented as <img> tags with an .svg as the source, we’ve encountered a few issues for VoiceOver and TalkBack users. These issues occur when those <img> tags don’t also have an ARIA role=”img” attribute.

[…]

2. <title> tags and SVGs

We often see examples of making SVGs accessible by simply adding a <title> element within the inline <svg>. While this does help in some situations, like a lone SVG icon within a link, adding a <title> element doesn’t make SVGs accessible in all browsing environments.

[…]

For example, when using Firefox and NVDA, a link containing an SVG would be recognized as a link, but the text within the <title> element would not be announced. NVDA announces the path within the href attribute only.

Adding an aria-labelledby attribute to the SVG can help expose the text within the <title> element to the browser’s accessibility API. However, even with this in place, NVDA does not announce the <title> text as we might expect.

Our most recommended approach when it comes to browser support and consistency across screen readers is to add a visually-hidden element as a sibling element to the <svg>. With this implementation, we’ve found that all browser and screen reader combinations tested were able to announce the link with the expected text announcement.

We also recommend adding aria-hidden=”true” to the <svg> element itself. This is to help prevent having any other text that may be embedded within the SVG be announced by screen readers. Then, the only text that should be announced would be the content within that visually-hidden element.

[…]

7. Colour contrast

While not a bug per se, we also see a lot of cases where designers and developers don’t plan for colour contrast issues for SVGs. Since SVGs function just like transparent GIFs in how they are displayed, different page background colors and effects can cause unanticipated issues for low vision users.

For example, a black SVG icon that’s perfectly visible with a white page background is going to be invisible in a Windows High Contrast theme that uses a black background. This is a common use case for users who use High Contrast settings due to light sensitivity or related issues. When you provide a solid background or contrasting border for SVGs, you can help avoid those kinds of problems.

How you design and implement your toggle buttons is quite up to you, but I hope you’ll remember this post when it comes to adding this particular component to your pattern library. There’s no reason why toggle buttons — or any interface component for that matter — should marginalize the number of people they often do.

You can take the basics explored here and add all sorts of design nuances, including animation. It’s just important to lay a solid foundation first.

Checklist

• Use form elements such as checkboxes for on/off toggles if you are certain the user won’t believe they are for submitting data.
• Use <button> elements, not links, with aria-pressed or role="switch" plus aria-checked.
• Don’t change label and state together.
• When using visual “on” and “off” text labels (or similar) you can override these with a unique label via aria-labelledby.
• Be careful to make sure the contrast level between the button’s text and background color meets WCAG 2.0 requirements.

See the source link for very detailed descriptions of all of these points.