aria-flowto changes reading order

• The reading order of content on the page can, in some cases, be made easier to understand by users of assistive technology with the use of aria-flowto.
• By default the reading order used by assistive technologies is the same as the DOM ordering of content.
• When the DOM order of content is interspersed with unrelated content, aria-flowto can be used to keep related content together. For example a multi-column newspaper where an article spans several columns, aria-flowto can be used to make it look like one continuous column to assistive technology.
• The aria-flowto reorganizes the content by changing the order of how the content is represented in accessibility Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) used by operating systems to communicate to screen readers.

Success Criterion 1.3.2 Meaningful Sequence

Other Related Success Criterion:

• The aria-flowto attribute value contains a sequence of idrefs that changes the reading order of content on the page as rendered by assistive technologies.
• Since aria-flowto changes reading order to assistive technologies, it is important to read the page with a screen reader to verify the content affected by the aria-flowto places related information in the proper sequence.

• Accessible Rich Internet Applications (WAI-ARIA) 1.2 Specification: flowto property