Fwd: FW: Expanded ARIA APIs for custom elements and more

--

Regards

SteveF
HTML 5.1 <http://www.w3.org/html/wg/drafts/html/master/>

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Domenic Denicola <d@domenic.me>
Date: 29 October 2014 08:55
Subject: FW: Expanded ARIA APIs for custom elements and more
To: Steve Faulkner <faulkner.steve@gmail.com>, Dominic Mazzoni <
dmazzoni@google.com>


Hi guys,

Since it looks like public-pfwg@w3.org is not actually public, I was hoping
one of you could pass this along to the working group? It's a culmination
of some earlier work I've shared around.

-----Original Message-----
From: Domenic Denicola
Sent: Tuesday, October 21, 2014 12:32
To: 'public-pfwg@w3.org'
Subject: Expanded ARIA APIs for custom elements and more

Hi all,

First time mailing you guys. I was inspired by the recent
Element.getComputedRole() thread to bring to you a problem I've been
working on recently. Namely, how to make custom elements as accessible as
native HTML elements.

This is motivated by my/Google's HTML as Custom Elements project [1], which
aims to re-build all of HTML's native elements as custom elements. It turns
out this is basically impossible from an accessibility perspective, as
custom elements are all treated as <div>s in the accessibility tree.

In [2] I wrote up a "gap analysis" of the capabilities of custom elements
with regard to accessibility. (Corrections and clarifications to it
welcome; file an issue or submit a pull request.) In it I propose a few
strawperson ideas for how to address these gaps. They are, roughly:

- An expansion of ARIA's vocabulary to cover all things currently exposed
to the accessibility tree by native elements: e.g. adding a caption and
paragraph role, but presumably lots more that I have not yet discovered.
- A way to customize an element's "implicit role".
- A way to control an element's "enforced states and properties".
- A way to customize an element's accessible name and description.

I would welcome any help from the group in refining these and driving them
forward as real proposals. I think they could substantially improve not
only the accessibility story for custom elements, but also the ways we are
able to create and test accessible elements generally.

[1]: https://github.com/dglazkov/html-as-custom-elements
[2]:
https://github.com/dglazkov/html-as-custom-elements/blob/master/docs/accessibility.md