ARIA landmark role with aria-hidden set to true

Question

ARIA landmark role with aria-hidden set to true are also shown when user lists out the landmarks regions. ( While using JAWS: Jaws key + CTRL + ;)

Example:

<div role="region" aria-label="tools menu" aria-hidden="true">....</div>

Which is displayed only on a click of a button "Tools menu"

My question is,

1. Is there a way such that this is not displayed when user lists out landmark roles?
2. Jaws didn't announce that particular region is hidden when I got into that using landmark role. What could have gone wrong? i am using Jaws 12.0
3. Is it working as expected?

Answer 1

I am confused at what you are trying to do here. An ARIA Landmark, allows a person using assistive technology to jump to certain parts of a page, so they don't need to read through the page to find a specific area. For example a sidebar, you could add role="complementary", or use the HTML5 <aside> tag. More information on HTML5 & roles at PGB.

The aria-hidden attribute is slightly counter-intuitve. So if we have:

<p aria-hidden="true">My cool text</p>

in code. The browser will render:

My cool text

If we look at this same block of text with assistive technology, the result would be like having

 <p></p>

Since you are combining a landmark and an attribute, JAWS is unsure what to do. Since landmarks have more power/authority/whatever, and you say give me all the landmarks, it will see it, and allow you to navigate there. However, once you're in it, it will see <div></div>.