RE: aria-level a required property for role="heading" or a supported property with an RFC SHOULD for authors

Hi,
Just to clarify something from my perspective, the 'should' versus 'must' isn't what bothers me, it's the idea that we can have headings that have no level at all. That makes no sense and doesn't help any ATs in building out structured layouts for users. It actually breaks this by causing a gap in the ability to map an intuitive tree.

I don't really care if this is a 'should' in the spec, as long as there is a clearly defined default value for the level, such as 1.

Conceptually this is the same as omitting aria-checked on role=checkbox, which defaults to aria-checked='false'.

So, omitting aria-level on role=heading could default to aria-level=1.

If this were the case, and it said so in the UAIG, browsers and ATs would have to abide by it, and developers could use role=heading with no aria-level, but with the understanding that they would be setting this to 1 by doing so.

Or, if they didn't like that, they could simply write a script to change the level dynamically. This is entirely doable. Devs are smart people right? It's not hard to write a recursive script for a portlet to change aria-level if they needed to and if the containers were nested properly.

I don't think this last is something the spec really needs to solve. It's whether a level is involved at all that is the question for me.



-----Original Message-----
From: Joseph Scheuhammer [mailto:clown@alum.mit.edu] 
Sent: Thursday, June 18, 2015 2:04 PM
To: WAI Protocols & Formats; Dominic Mazzoni; Alexander Surkov; David Bolter; Cynthia Shelly; James Craig
Subject: Re: aria-level a required property for role="heading" or a supported property with an RFC SHOULD for authors

On 2015-06-18 3:06 PM, Bryan Garaventa wrote:
> Just to simplify my view, if heading levels are optional, ATs and 
> browsers will never provide consistent UIs, because they will always 
> do something different by guessing.

Tangent:  What do Chrome, FF, IE, and Safari, do, in fact, when faced with "heading", but no aria-level?  For example,

<div role="heading>...</div>

How is the level property mapped?

--
;;;;joseph.

'Array(16).join("wat" - 1) + " Batman!"'
            - G. Bernhardt -

Received on Friday, 19 June 2015 00:39:37 UTC