The CORE-AAM section on Relations requires that assistive technologies SHOULD provide a method to navigate to (and within) structured content referenced by aria-describedby.
Note that aria-describedby may reference structured or interactive information where users would want to be able to navigate to different sections of content. User agents MAY provide a way for the user to navigate to structured information referenced by aria-describedby and assistive technology SHOULD provide such a method.
What happens when the element referenced by aria-describedby is hidden? In that case, the user agent is supposed to compile the hidden element's plain text as part of the referencing element's accessible description, but the hidden element is not directly included in the accessibility tree. So there is nothing for assistive tech to navigate to.
Is that acceptable? If so, the quoted passage above should be qualified to say "if the referenced element is not hidden" or "if the referenced element is included in the accessibility tree".
If we instead want to support access to structured descriptions even if they are hidden, then the rules for including elements in the accessibility tree need to change.
(I'm converting SVG-AAM spec issues into GitHub issues, and this was one of them, because SVG <desc> is a hidden description that we don't currently include in the accessibility tree.)
The CORE-AAM section on Relations requires that assistive technologies SHOULD provide a method to navigate to (and within) structured content referenced by
aria-describedby.What happens when the element referenced by
aria-describedbyis hidden? In that case, the user agent is supposed to compile the hidden element's plain text as part of the referencing element's accessible description, but the hidden element is not directly included in the accessibility tree. So there is nothing for assistive tech to navigate to.Is that acceptable? If so, the quoted passage above should be qualified to say "if the referenced element is not hidden" or "if the referenced element is included in the accessibility tree".
If we instead want to support access to structured descriptions even if they are hidden, then the rules for including elements in the accessibility tree need to change.
(I'm converting SVG-AAM spec issues into GitHub issues, and this was one of them, because SVG
<desc>is a hidden description that we don't currently include in the accessibility tree.)