OpenA11y Evaluation Library

Widgets must have owned elements

Rule ID Widget 7
Conformance Required
Definition Container widgets must have required owned elements.
Purpose
  • ARIA roles, properties and states describes the features of interactive widgets to users of assistive technologies, especially screen reader users.
  • Roles that are associated with container widgets have important parent/child relationships with other roles.
  • Parent/Child relationships are used by assistive technologies for computing the number of items in a container and the item position.
  • Container roles are also used by assistive technologies to provide enhanced navigation features for moving between items in lists, tables, grids and treegrids.
Conformance Required
WCAG Success Criteria

Success Criterion 4.1.2 Name, Role, Value

Other Related Success Criterion:

Rule Category ARIA Widgets
Rule Scope Element
First Step no
Techniques
  • Required owned elements can be defined using the HTML DOM structure or the aria-owns attribute.
  • Use the DOM structure to add required owned elements by making them a descendant of the container element.
  • When the owned elements are not descendants of the container element, use the aria-owns attribute on the container element to reference the owned elements.
  • When aria-busy attribute is set to true on the container element, the container element does not need to own any required elements. aria-busy should be used when a container element is being dynamically populated.
  • NOTE: The DOM structure technique is preferred over the aria-owns technique, since it is less likely to result in authoring errors associated with creating and referencing elements with unique ids.
Information Links