Re: Question about the new/proposed "tbody" role for tables

On Tue, Mar 31, 2015 at 10:20 PM, Joanmarie Diggs <jdiggs@igalia.com> wrote:

> Hi all.
>
> As you know, right now we have a generic "rowgroup" role, along with a
> note [1] that states:
>
>     Note: This role does not differentiate between types of row groups
>     (e.g., thead vs. tbody), but an issue has been raised for WAI-ARIA
>     2.0.
>
> Given that we're creating the new non-interactive table roles for 1.1, I
> think we can/should address the above now, creating ARIA roles thead,
> tfoot, and tbody. If you don't agree with this, please tell me now. :)
>


There are strong voices on the mail list to consider role="rowgroup" as
author error (if rowgroup is not focusable) because HTML tfood/thead/tbody
elements are not accessible in general. So I'm a bit suspicious to extend
ARIA for that :)


>
> If you do agree these roles should be created: My plan was to make
> thead, tfoot, and tbody subclasses of the current rowgroup role. An ARIA
> table or grid could have at most one ARIA thead and one ARIA tfoot, just
> like in HTML. The question is what about ARIA tbody?
>
> HTML lets you have multiple tbody elements, so we could do that as well.
> However, HTML also prescribes exactly where these tbody elements can be
> placed. ARIA, on the other hand has aria-owns. I think a non-interactive
> ARIA table which can have an unspecified number of ARIA tbody instances
> that can be scattered throughout the DOM thanks to aria-owns is asking
> for trouble.
>
> The solutions that spring to my mind are:
>
> 1. You can have at most one ARIA tbody, but can then further delineate
>    the rows in that tbody into ARIA rowgroups.
>
> 2. You can have as many ARIA tbody instances as you want, just like
>    HTML. But then you cannot use aria-owns to place them outside of
>    the parent ARIA table or grid.
>
> My personal preference at the moment is for option 1. But it's not a
> strong preference. Whatever works for authors and user agents and in the
> end is accessible via the accessible table interface is fine by me.
>
> Mind you, if everyone thinks it's no problem to have however many tbody
> instances you want, and put them wherever in the DOM you want, and the
> accessible table interface implementation for that table will work as
> expected for each platform.... I'm skeptical, but ok. :)
>
> Lemme know. Thanks!
> --joanie
>
> [1] http://www.w3.org/TR/wai-aria/roles#rowgroup
>
>