Re: special case for aria-activedescendant (Was Re: Agenda: April 7, 2016 WAI-ARIA Working Group)

Hi Matt,

On 2016-04-07 2:52 PM, Matt King wrote:
> Thank you Joseph.
>
> Since we are requiring aria-controls in the aria 1.1 combo and aria-owns in the aria 1.0 combo, perhaps we could simplify this by saying that when activedescendant is applied to an element A, the value of activedescendant may refer to either a descendant of element  A or a descendant of an element controlled by element A?
>
> Matt

The problem is that neither aria-controls nor aria-owns plays any role
in this special case of aria-activedescendant.

Aria-controls is irrelevant since it has nothing to do with
ancestor/descendant relationships.

Aria-owns is relevant; however, the case in question is where it is
replaced with aria-controls.  The ancestor/descendant relationships are
not correct.  Nonetheless, Bryan has reported that the focus as defined
by aria-activedescendant still works [1].

Thus, the only relevant aria information in theses two cases, is the
text entry's aria-activedescendant property.  In other words,
aria-activedescendant focus management works for comboboxes irrespective
of (in spite of?) the DOM hierarchy, aria-owns, and aria-controls. 
That's what what needs to be documented.


[1] https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-aria/2016Feb/0251.html


> -----Original Message-----
> From: Joseph Scheuhammer [mailto:clown@alum.mit.edu] 
> Sent: Thursday, April 7, 2016 11:24 AM
> To: Bryan Garaventa <bryan.garaventa@ssbbartgroup.com>; Rich Schwerdtfeger <schwer@yahoo.com>; ARIA <public-aria@w3.org>
> Subject: Re: Agenda: April 7, 2016 WAI-ARIA Working Group
>
> On 2016-04-07 12:25 PM, Bryan Garaventa wrote:
>> That looks good to me.
> All right.  However, it occurs to me that both situations are possible. 
> That is, the text input field uses aria-activedescendant to reference the faux focus.  In the case you are concerned with, that input has role="combobox".  In the other case, it has a textbox role.  However, in neither case is the element referenced by aria-activedescendant actually a descendant of the input.  Both situations have to be addressed.
>
> With that in mind, here is another attempt that covers both:
>
> "A special use case is a combobox where its text input field has DOM focus, and that input element uses aria-activedescendant to reference the currently active item within the combobox's popup.  In one case, the text input field has role="combobox" whereas, in another case, it is a textbox.  Regardless, the element referenced by aria-activedescendant is not in fact a descendant of the input.  Even so, the aria-activedescendant property is treated by user agents as the active descendant of the combobox."
>
> --
> ;;;;joseph.
>
> 'Die Wahrheit ist Irgendwo da Draußen. Wieder.'
>                  - C. Carter -
>
>
>


-- 
;;;;joseph.

'Die Wahrheit ist Irgendwo da Draußen. Wieder.'
                 - C. Carter -

Received on Tuesday, 19 April 2016 14:55:38 UTC