ARIA property
aria-flowto
Overrides reading order by pointing at what should be read next. Rarely the right answer.
It replaces document order with an order you chose, for the element it sits on. Point at one element and reading continues there. Point at several and assistive technology should offer them as a set of paths to choose between.
Which roles may carry aria-flowto
- Value
- ID reference list
- Filed as
- A property, which is how ARIA files it and not a rule about how often it changes.
- Roles that may carry it
- Any role. This one is global, which is why no individual role lists it.
Global means no role has to grant permission for it. There is one more place to check, because ARIA in HTML sets rules per element as well as per role, and it allows no aria-* attributes at all on a datalist or on the html element. Past that, the way a global attribute goes wrong is rarely where it sits. It is whether it is still true, which is the next section.
Every role above comes from the specification's own list for this attribute, checked name for name. The normative definition stays with the W3C, in the aria-flowto section of the ARIA specification.
Keeping aria-flowto true
An override of reading order has to be maintained as carefully as the reading order it replaced, which is the argument against reaching for it. Every id it names has to keep existing, because an unresolved one is dropped without a word and a list where nothing resolves is treated as if the attribute were absent. Reorder the page and the path you built no longer describes it, with nothing to tell you. Fixing the DOM order is almost always the smaller job, and it survives your next redesign.
How aria-flowto gets checked
There are test rules that check an ARIA attribute is one that exists, is allowed on the role underneath it, and carries a value of the right type. What they map to is ARIA's own author requirements rather than any WCAG criterion, so a misplaced attribute breaks ARIA without being a WCAG failure by itself. It becomes one under 4.1.2 Name, Role, Value the moment the missing or wrong value means the control's state cannot be worked out programmatically, which is what usually happens next.
The value testing skips id references on purpose. Pointing at an element that does not exist and having no pointer at all come to the same end, so a broken reference fails no rule directly. It fails later, wherever the missing name or description was needed.
Nothing automated catches the failure this page is about. A stale value is a valid value, on a permitted role, with the right type. It is only wrong about the world.
Attributes you will meet alongside aria-flowto
- aria-atomic Whether an update should be read whole, or only the part that changed.
- aria-busy Says a region is still being updated, so wait before announcing it.
- aria-controls Points at what this control operates. A combobox has to say what it opens.
- aria-current Marks the one item in a set that represents the here and now, such as the current page in a nav.
- aria-describedby Points at further description, read after the name. Hints and error text usually go here.
- aria-details Points at richer explanation elsewhere in the page, which people can navigate to rather than have read out.
- aria-hidden Removes an element from the accessibility tree while leaving it on screen.
- aria-keyshortcuts Lists the keyboard shortcuts that activate this control, so they can be announced and checked for clashes.
Every ARIA state and property · Every ARIA role · ARIA explained