Argument for keeping proposed ARIA caption and legend roles separate

I would just like to comment on the proposed caption and legend roles and the idea of using a single role.

We have the HTML spec that has already defined caption and legend elements for providing labels and we have some accessibility APIs that also have legend and caption roles.

But in ARIA we are going to say the semantics and the history of these two roles is not relevant and we will just merge them into one role.

While I agree programmatically they are doing the same or similar things, so it seems like a way to eliminate some work for ARIA to do.

But I think it will look strange for the role we eliminate and confuse authors to see only one of these roles available to them.

We can argue that HTML should not have used two roles in the first place and maybe accessibility APIs shouldn't have either, but they did.

So I don't think ARIA should try to merge them, keeping them separate will provide clearer mappings to accessibility APIs and support naming conventions that authors are already familiar with.

Jon

Jon Gunderson, Ph.D., CPWA
Coordinator of Accessible IT Group
University of Illinois at Urbana/Champaign
1207 S. Oak Street
Champaign, IL 61820

www: https://go.illinois.edu/jongund