[Bug 19277] Relationship and precedence of hidden="" and display:none should be clarified/defined

https://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=19277

--- Comment #7 from John Foliot <john@foliot.ca> 2012-10-05 15:45:15 UTC ---
(In reply to comment #4)
> 
> If the hidden attribute is only for user agents that don't access the document
> using the Accessibility APIs does aria-hidden cover the Accessibility APIs?
> Like you discuss here [1]?

In my opinion, there should be an exact 1-to-1 mapping between the 2 attributes
(including rendering rules), but as @required and aria-required="true" shows
us, that is not always the case today:
http://john.foliot.ca/required-inputs/

David Bolter (Mozilla) made what I consider a reasonable case for why this is
the way it is, which I can accept given the uneven progress of the 2
attributes. 

As David noted however, both @required and aria-required="true" mapped back to
the identical Accessibility API in Firefox, and that it was only the visual
rendering that was different.  

With the decision on Issue 204 however, the WG has reversed even that emergent
precedent, as now @hidden will NOT map to the same state as aria-hidden="true"
with regard to the Accessibility APIs.

> 
> If so, then the Strong Native Semantics section [2] might need an update as
> well because right now the hidden attribute implies aria-hidden set to "true".
> Which doesn’t seem right if aria-hidden is for the Accessibility APIs and the
> hidden attribute is for everyone else.
> 
> But even if the relationships between display:none, hidden, and aria-hidden was
> cleared up I still think it would be a much better solution to use CSS media
> types for this. If I wanted to hide something from a screen reader I would use
> this (or similar):
> 
> @media speech {
>   #example {
>     display:none;
>   }
> }
> 
> But that would require that all user agents / ATs to use the media type that
> you would expect it to use.

...and that we had strong support for that CSS, both from the browsers as well
as the screen readers. (It would require, for example, that Braille output
devices also adopt the speech rules, which I believe is a reasonable position,
but one outside of the browser-vendors normal reach)

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Received on Friday, 5 October 2012 15:45:17 UTC