WAI-ARIA landmark roles in default theme to increase accessibility

[peterkz]

The ​WAI ARIA specification defines a set of specialised "landmark" roles. These roles provide a method to programmatically identify commonly found sections of web page content in a consistent way.

This allows assistive technologies to provide users with features which they can use to identify and navigate to sections of page content. For more information see ​Using WAI ARIA Landmark Roles by Steve Faulkner.

This patch adds basic ARIA landmark role information to the default theme.

[DD32]

Since i assume this isnt yet a released standard, I guess it'll mean the theme will not pass validation? (Which is a meaningless mark i know, I'm just thinking of all the nazi's :))

[peterkz]

Replying to DD32:

Since i assume this isnt yet a released standard, I guess it'll mean the theme will not pass validation? (Which is a meaningless mark i know, I'm just thinking of all the nazi's :))

Apparently the W3C are looking into modifying the W3C validator to include experimental support for WAI-ARIA. Currently other validators have included a custom DTD to enable validation (e.g. ​Markup validator S.A.C).

Personally, I take accessibility over validation any day:-)

[peterkz]

Added an optional version that makes use of the jQuery library included with Wordpress to set the landmark roles. This means that the HTML is still valid.

[MarcoZ]

Replying to peterkz:

Added an optional version that makes use of the jQuery library included with Wordpress to set the landmark roles. This means that the HTML is still valid.

I just tried this patch against SVN R10943, and it doesn't work. JAWS does not report the landmarks don't show up on either the front page or the single post views. The patch applied cleanly, so the approach to do it via jQuery doesn't seem to work right yet.

Peter, did JAWS show you the landmarks when you implemented this version of the patch?

[MarcoZ]

I tested ​the hardcoded landmarks patch, and it works great. Since the theme already has the aria-required attribute hardcoded and thus doesn't pass validation anyway, and it was once said that accessibility enhancement should be favored over the validation, I recommend to take this patch.

[ryan]

(In [10945]) Add WAI-ARIA landmark roles to default theme. Props peterkz. fixes #9408