[BLOCKED] doc-pullquote should be exposed as repeated content; not hidden

[joanmarie]

A user might wish to know that a pullquote is present in the document -- even if it is just repeated for visual effect. But https://w3c.github.io/dpub-aria/#example-39 makes that impossible because it uses aria-hidden="true". Hidden content is typically pruned from the accessibility tree.

If there were an ARIA property which allowed authors to mark something as "repeated content" then a screen reader could have an option to hide/show repeated content. Then users who don't want to read the duplicated content would get the same result as aria-hidden="true". But users who do want that repeated content presented would be able to.

I've marked this as "BLOCKED" because ARIA currently has no such feature. But that might change. See w3c/aria#1044.

[mattgarrish]

I see this is marked with the ARIA 1.3 milestone, so not something we can address in this revision.

Would it make sense to add a note that such an attribute is under discussion and may be available in the future, or is that too speculative at this point?

[mattgarrish]

It looks like w3c/aria#1044 was closed without providing any help for this issue.

Hiding pullquotes is a pretty awful experience. When there's no way to cycle through the pullquotes, it leaves AT users without the same ability to read the quotes and see if they're interested in reading an article. They aren't duplicate visual emphasis but a key enticement to read.

Any idea what else we could try for this @joanmarie ?

[pkra]

I think the discussion around w3c/aria#1746 might be useful, in particular the wai-cc discussion linked to at w3c/aria#1746 (comment). That is, this seems like something that a user might want to control via some form of verbosity setting in their AT.

[mattgarrish]

@GeorgeKerscher has been doing some research into this, and the consensus he's been finding is that AT users do not care to hear pullquotes where they happen to be marked up in the content. Like visual readers, the pullquote is meant to entice you to read. When you're actually reading you don't want to hear the redundancy.

But maybe selectively enabling their playback would work, as for most users the option would be to disable. It at least wouldn't make the pullquotes invisible to AT, so while playback in the linear reading order would be disabled, it would still be possible to offer users the ability to cycle through them.