Re: ISSUE-636 ACTION-1398 Provide spec. text for aria-roledescription

On Apr 3, 2014, at 11:07 AM, Joanmarie Diggs <jdiggs@igalia.com> wrote:

>   I say at least, because when you use a real role, the screen reader
>   can do things like: a) include the number of charts (or videos) as
>   part of its "document summary" feature. b) provide quick keys to
>   jump to the next/prev chart (or video). c) respect the user's braille
>   verbosity setting, which may include not displaying certain roles in
>   braille, or displaying them via a symbolic indicator, or displaying
>   them using a localized abbreviation. Bit of a shame to lose that....

I object to the insinuation that we're losing something; we can't lose something we've never had. No one is implying we should use role description *instead of* adding new roles. No one is arguing against the benefit of having real roles with additional functionality. We are all in agreement that that many new roles should be added, for all the reasons you listed and many more. 

I think we all also realize the W3C standardization process takes years (ARIA 1.0 took ~9 years) and that we will *never* be able to keep up with the author and user need if we limit usage to a strictly defined taxonomy with no flexibility. The work on "web components" tackles a similar problem. The engineers involved realized that the HTML working group can standardize the most common elements, and still allow a flexible approach for authors to customize their own. As the custom element usage grows, common design patterns will arise, and the HTML WG will be able to recognize and  standardize the most common of those new element types. Similarly, we'll be able to see how developers use "role description" (or whatever it's called) which will inform this Working Group what additional roles are needed for future versions of ARIA. We know of many roles that we think will be useful (chart and video are two out of hundreds), but none of us can claim to know which will be most common or most useful. It's all just speculation.

The role description proposal is just the first piece of  an extensibility plan for ARIA; the reason it's attainable is because it's already supported as-is in at least three platform accessibility APIs. Other pieces of the extensibility plan (e.g. actions or behaviors) are more difficult because the platform APIs treat those differently, so it doesn't quite fit as neatly into ARIA and will take additional discussion.

James

Received on Thursday, 3 April 2014 18:36:39 UTC