Lately I have been part of building a quite popular website in my native country, and this time, as I have had more autonomy than before, decided to go ahead and add as much accessibility helping markup and proper elements as possible. Eg. everything that can be clicked is now a button (no more divs with onClick-handlers) and by the way, is adding tabIndex to divs even sufficient for triggering clicks? Since by default the Enter-key is not bound to trigger the click-event for elements other than buttons and links (I assume).
Anyway, I went ahead and added as much accessibility I could, but some things were bit too much of extra work that I decided not to add them. So I was just wondering, how bad is it when modals don't automatically capture the focus and you can't really travel into them unless moving all the way to end of the document (where the element lies)? From what I glanced from the aria spec, the focus should immediately move into the modal and get trapped where you can only by invoking an action (eg esc-key, click x-button or submit) dismiss them.
Also how important are the aria-labels for buttons and such? Should everything worth noticing be annotated? Or can you guess from say the button text what they are for. Also I read somewhere that inputs should always have labels, but sometimes it's problematic to add them eg dates with three inputs with only one label "Birthdate". Can I supplement the label with some aria-property instead?
Sorry for asking so many long questions, these things have been on my mind a lot and I really haven't had anyone to tell me if the accessibility fields I have added were correct or not. It's quite annoying how confusing the spec is and how difficult it's to know if the aria properties are correct/make sense or not. Eg how many aria-haspopup etc properties should a dropdown have and which of its elements have which.