Your daily frequent11y newsletter, brought to you by @ChrisBAshton:
- A Jeremy Keith entry from his journal. Lists are helpfully announced to screen readers when they are navigated to (e.g. “List: six items”). However, Webkit browsers such as Safari don’t announce lists if the lists’ bullets have been removed using CSS (just like it doesn’t announce content that has been visually hidden with
display: none). There’s a Twitter thread explaining why, but it boils down to this: “If a sighted user doesn’t need to know it’s a list, why would a screen reader user?” - If you’ve removed bullets but your content is a list (you may have used some visual replacement for bullets, e.g. image markers), you can force screen readers to treat your content as a list by adding
role="list". - There’s an interesting point about “pixel perfection” across browsers, too. It’s widely considered to be an unattainable or undesirable goal nowadays; why should we demand the aural equivalent? Websites don’t need to sound identical in every screen reader.
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