[Bug 10603] New: Clarify what default roles UAs may assign to elements not listed in the ARIA section

http://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=10603

           Summary: Clarify what default roles UAs may assign to elements
                    not listed in the ARIA section
           Product: HTML WG
           Version: unspecified
          Platform: PC
               URL: http://dev.w3.org/html5/spec/content-models.html#annot
                    ations-for-assistive-technology-products-aria
        OS/Version: All
            Status: NEW
          Severity: normal
          Priority: P2
         Component: HTML5 spec (editor: Ian Hickson)
        AssignedTo: ian@hixie.ch
        ReportedBy: bhawkeslewis@googlemail.com
         QAContact: public-html-bugzilla@w3.org
                CC: mike@w3.org, public-html@w3.org


I'm fairly confused about what default ARIA roles UAs may assign to elements
not explicitly listed in the ARIA section, e.g. "html", "head", "body",
elements inside "head", "img" with non-empty "alt", and "i". (See also the
discussion in Bug 10841)

If an element is not listed anywhere in the section does that mean it has no
default role? There's a list of "elements in HTML [that] have no default role
and no restrictions on what roles can be applied to those elements", but why
are (say) "i" and "img" with non-empty "alt" missing from both the tables and
the list?

The spec says: "User agents may apply different defaults than those described
in this section in order to expose the semantics of HTML elements in a manner
more fine-grained than possible with the above definitions." Is this supposed
to mean that they can map elements to platform accessibility APIs in ways more
specific than currently covered by ARIA? Or that they could apply more complex
heuristics than the spec's tables and lists to determining which of the current
default ARIA roles to apply to an element? If /that's/ the case, then it should
be made clearer that the default roles and restrictions tabulated and listed
are merely informative suggestions.

Would it be possible to clarify this?

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Received on Saturday, 11 September 2010 22:59:38 UTC