Re: Indicating swipe actions on an element

Those are widget actions and both IA2 and ATK provides action interface to
expose them (action name, description and invoke). Neither ARIA nor UAIG
address accessible actions so Firefox makes an assumption based on ARIA
role. That means you could go with custom ARIA role + Firefox support. It's
not flexible approach but it works in case of Firefox OS. Alternatively
IndieUI as James says looks promising.

Thanks.
Alexander.


On Thu, May 22, 2014 at 1:28 AM, Marco Zehe <marco.zehe@googlemail.com>wrote:

> Hi all!
>
> While making the UI for Firefox OS accessible, we're running into the
> situation where we need to indicate that an item can not only be activated
> in the normal way, but that certain swipe actions can also be performed. An
> analogous example can be found in iOS in the status bar, when VoiceOver is
> active:
>
> 1. In many cases, double-tapping any status bar icon scrolls the main view
> all the way to the top.
> 2. At the same time, swiping down with 3 fingers while any of the status
> bar items has accessiblity focus will bring up the notification center.
> 3. And 3 finger swipe upwards will bring up the control center (in iOS 7
> and above).
>
> We'd like to see a semantic means be added to WAI-ARIA to specify that a
> user can execute the accessible form of a swipe to perform additional
> actions.
>
> Initial thinking goes along the lines of a new attribute called
> aria-swipedirection with an atomic list of valid attribute values of "up",
> "down", "left" and "right".
>
> When specified, assistive technologies can assume that, when a particular
> swipe action is being requested by them, the element would be behaving
> accordingly. In addition, this would allow assistive technologies to
> provide tutor messages similar to what can be heard spoken by VoiceOver in
> iOS when a status bar icon is touched.
>
> The attribute would be applicable to any element that the author intends
> to react to swiping gestures (for example swipe left to delete an item,
> swipe down open the notifications etc.).
>
> Points I'm not sure about:
> 1. How this would map to platform APIs other than an object attribute
> (like in IA2 and ATK). Probably something that can be covered by an IndieUI
> supported action set.
> 2. It's very specific to touch interfaces. But then, so is role "key" that
> we also proposed. :-)
>
> This is not a formal proposal yet.
>
> Thoughts?
>
> Marco
>
>
>