RE: [RFC] Making default spinbutton values more consistent with the defaults for HTML5's input type="number"

Hi, I have clients who are currently using Spinbutton controls that use negative values, so this is valid. E.G a range between -150 and 150 for instance.

-----Original Message-----
From: James Teh [mailto:jamie@nvaccess.org] 
Sent: Sunday, January 17, 2016 4:53 PM
To: Joanmarie Diggs <jdiggs@igalia.com>; Accessible Rich Internet Applications Working Group <public-aria@w3.org>
Cc: James Craig <jcraig@apple.com>; Alexander Surkov <surkov.alexander@gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [RFC] Making default spinbutton values more consistent with the defaults for HTML5's input type="number"

Hi Joanie,

On 15/01/2016 5:16 AM, Joanmarie Diggs wrote:
> One possibility which was suggested is that ARIA use "-1" as the value 
> of the attributes which are missing or not a number.
My major concern with this is that -1 could be a real value. Is there anything that states that the values can't be negative? What if someone specified a minimum of (literally) -1 and a maximum of 1? We wouldn't want that minimum to be interpreted as "unknown". Am I missing something here?

> My questions are:
>
> 1. Will that pose any problems for any ATs or platform APIs?
Probably nothing that can't be addressed in the platform mapping guidelines. In IAccessible2, IAccessibleValue's methods should return an empty value (not -1) if there is nothing to return. So, the mapping to
IA2 would need to account for this. NVDA actually only uses aria-valuetext at the moment, so any implementation we do could account for this change.

> 2. For aria-valuenow, would it make more sense to set the value to the
>     empty string if it is missing or not a number?
IMO, this makes more sense for all three.

> 3. What do people think about nixing what we have (just for spinbutton
>     values) and replacing it with text boiling down to user agents doing
>     whatever they'd do given an HTML5 input type="number" with missing
>     or non-numeric values?
This would certainly make things easier from a consistency point of view; user agents then know they just handle it the same way (probably with the same code). It seems potentially odd to refer to another spec like this (does it make ARIA harder to apply to stuff other than HTMl/does this matter?), but I'm sure there are others better qualified to comment on that.

Thanks,
Jamie

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James Teh
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Received on Monday, 18 January 2016 07:05:38 UTC