Circumstances have forced me to upgrade some time this year, and I looked at V 3.2.0 with some trepidation. Lo and behold, most of my suggestions from years back have been incorporated! The work seems to have been done pretty carefully and with considerable thought. Well done to whoever did it!
Having said that, my own mods go far further and I will be implementing them over the coming months.
I have nevertheless noticed a number of things that you probably only notice if you are a screen reader user yourself. Some examples:
- In the UCP, for instance, the navigation menu down the side (class = "navigation) has been assigned the role "navigation", which flags it as a landmark in the screen reader. This is good, but the primary navigation element in the UCP is actually the tab bar (class = "tabs"), and this should also be given the "navigation" role.
- Where there are two navigation roles (or search roles or whatever) on a page, and the screen reader has no other label to distinguish them, an ARIA label should be used to distinguish the two navigation areas. The same applies to the multiple search boxes on pages. This is because if I navigate using the landmarks in a screen reader, I hear that there are, for instance 2 search landmarks. I cannot decide from the list of landmarks which search area I need to go to unless one says "search entire board" and the other says "search this forum".
- On a topic page, there is also a search box to "search this topic" (which also has a "search" role assigned. However, all the search box does is to highlight the search term in the text. This is of no use to a blind user. That entire search box should be marked "aria-hidden".
But my comment in the title applies. Well done on a good job.