Re: [REVIEW REQUESTED][ARIA] placeholder

Alexander Surkov <surkov.alexander@gmail.com> wrote on 04/02/2015 12:36:56 
PM:
> Hey. I'm agree that placeholder has different semantics than label 
> and value but I'm still not certain about how this semantics can be 
> used by AT.
> The point is if there's no consumers for it then there's
> no great benefit from having it.

We will not have AT consumers until we have a way for it to be consumed.

> SO do we have any data how AT 
> developers want to handle @placeholder?

AT developers have had not the option to handle it yet so no data yet.

But, you do have some AT users here saying that as a user, we would prefer 
that our AT have the ability or option to tell us about a placeholder. We 
do not want those semantics lost. We do not want you to see a placeholder 
and us to experience it as something different.

> Firefox was used to map HTML
> @placeholder into accessible name and it seems it worked fine with AT.

It is fine sometimes and not so at other times.

The issue here is who should get to make the decision of how to create the 
user experience in cases where authors have not provided complete 
accessibility information. Placeholder is not a label so treating it as a 
label is only a "possible fallback option" when authors did not follow 
accessibility requirements.

That is another problem with making placeholder part of the name 
calculation. Since placeholder isn't a label, it should not be allowed to 
be treated as a name substitute when performing conformance testing. 

Matt King
IBM Senior Technical Staff Member
I/T Chief Accessibility Strategist
IBM BT/CIO - Global Workforce and Web Process Enablement 
Phone: (503) 578-2329, Tie line: 731-7398
mattking@us.ibm.com

Alexander Surkov <surkov.alexander@gmail.com> wrote on 04/02/2015 12:36:56 
PM:

> From: Alexander Surkov <surkov.alexander@gmail.com>
> To: Joanmarie Diggs <jdiggs@igalia.com>, 
> Cc: "W3C WAI Protocols & Formats" <public-pfwg@w3.org>
> Date: 04/02/2015 12:37 PM
> Subject: Re: [REVIEW REQUESTED][ARIA] placeholder
> 
> Hey. I'm agree that placeholder has different semantics than label 
> and value but I'm still not certain about how this semantics can be 
> used by AT. The point is if there's no consumers for it then there's
> no great benefit from having it. Iirc we started this chat before 
> but I don't recall what outcome was. SO do we have any data how AT 
> developers want to handle @placeholder? Firefox was used to map HTML
> @placeholder into accessible name and it seems it worked fine with AT.

> Btw, I'm not sure I agree that placeholder cannot be used instead of
> label. That should be the use case for mobile web. On the other hand
> there are examples of minimalistic UI on desktop, like searchbox on 
> DEVMO page [1] that doesn't have a label.

> Thanks.
> Alex.
> 
> [1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/
> 
> On Thu, Apr 2, 2015 at 12:52 PM, Joanmarie Diggs <jdiggs@igalia.com> 
wrote:
> Hey all.
> 
> I'm pretty sure that I've incorporated everyone's feedback into my
> proposal for aria-placeholder. But I would like a final review just to
> be sure as the discussion seems to have stopped. Here's the branch:
> https://rawgit.com/w3c/aria/action-1349/aria/aria.html#aria-placeholder
> 
> As per the discussion at today's ARIA concall, if there is no feedback
> on this by next week, I shall merge it into master.
> 
> --joanie