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

>From a screen reader user perspective I don't think leaving the heading
level up to the user agent is a good idea.

When writing instructions for users of screen reader, you must be able to
dependon a few constant. One of taem is heading levels (right or wrong).

I need to be able to tell user that this section is under the 3rd h2 heading
on the page, or the second h4 heading after the h1.

If we introduce user agent handling when determining aria levels all such
instructions will become inaccurate as heading levels will differ between
interpretations of various user agents and assistive technologies.

I am not overly aggressive on heading levels always being 100% accurate, but
if they stop being predictable and consistent between user agents they will
lose their meaning as a reliable navigation aide and will only take on the
meaning of marking the paragraph of text as different or important in some
way.

Besides, I often see an h1 or an h2 heading followed by an h5 or h6
paragraph that is some sort of a disclaimer text.

Think

<h1>Welcome to Corporation XYZ</h1>

<h5>WE are the best in the business of doing business</h5>

If now we marked next section of the page, say, "Our departments" with a
generic heading role and left it to the user agents to calculate its level.

<p role="heading" aria-level="subsection">Our Deparmtnets</p>

It would be mapped as an h7 heading, .. it should be an h2.

 

If a generic <h> element were introduced to html I would be more on board
with it as I would hope that its general use would force user agents into
some form of consistency, but creating the concept of a heading whose level
is determined by user agent, only for assistive technologies, I think, will
create more confusion than be helpful.

Even if we are not sure whether integrated components on our webpage should
be an h2 or h4, I think the page author can have a pretty good idea of
whether it is an h1 (main purpose of page) or an h7 (basically meaningless),
whereas if we leave it to user agents, they can introduce a lot of problems
along these lines.

Therefore I still feel like aria-level should either be mandatory or at
least should default to an agreed upon default value for all user agents
(and h2 is no worse than any).

 

 

From: Schnabel, Stefan [mailto:stefan.schnabel@sap.com] 
Sent: Friday, June 19, 2015 4:14 AM
To: Gunderson, Jon R; Richard Schwerdtfeger; John Foliot
Cc: 'Joseph Scheuhammer'; 'Cynthia Shelly'; 'David Bolter'; 'Dominic
Mazzoni'; 'James Craig'; 'WAI Protocols & Formats'; 'Alexander Surkov'
Subject: RE: aria-level a required property for role="heading" or a
supported property with an RFC SHOULD for authors

 

I second the "computed level" approach since this leaves the leveling info
to the user agent (derived by structure), which is favorable always when the
UI framework doesn't know exactly about the heading nesting and for some
reasons the page is assembled from various sources (meaning that there is no
"human" page author setting actively the heading levels).

 

-       Stefan

 

 

From: Gunderson, Jon R [mailto:jongund@illinois.edu] 
Sent: Donnerstag, 18. Juni 2015 23:38
To: Richard Schwerdtfeger; John Foliot
Cc: 'Joseph Scheuhammer'; 'Cynthia Shelly'; 'David Bolter'; 'Dominic
Mazzoni'; 'James Craig'; 'WAI Protocols & Formats'; 'Alexander Surkov'
Subject: RE: aria-level a required property for role="heading" or a
supported property with an RFC SHOULD for authors

 

Could there be a value that would indicate an automatically generate a
computed level, for example:

 

aria-level="auto" would mean use the heading level of the previous heading
in document order

 

aria-level="subsection" would mean use one heading level down from the
previous heading in document order

 

Jon

 

 

From: Richard Schwerdtfeger [mailto:schwer@us.ibm.com] 
Sent: Thursday, June 18, 2015 4:30 PM
To: John Foliot
Cc: 'Joseph Scheuhammer'; 'Cynthia Shelly'; 'David Bolter'; 'Dominic
Mazzoni'; 'James Craig'; 'WAI Protocols & Formats'; 'Alexander Surkov'
Subject: RE: aria-level a required property for role="heading" or a
supported property with an RFC SHOULD for authors

 

Yes, but lack of a level provides no level context and it does not align
well with an HTML document whose native elements ALL provide a level. The
question is not what the default behavior is when you leave it off but
rather what we should be requiring authors to do. I think Mac does the best
you can do in the absence of a level. 


Rich Schwerdtfeger

"John Foliot" ---06/18/2015 04:19:55 PM---+1, I have previously suggested
that this is the better response (holy cow James, we're going 2 for

From: "John Foliot" <john.foliot@deque.com <mailto:john.foliot@deque.com> >
To: "'James Craig'" <jcraig@apple.com <mailto:jcraig@apple.com> >, "'Joseph
Scheuhammer'" <clown@alum.mit.edu <mailto:clown@alum.mit.edu> >
Cc: "'WAI Protocols & Formats'" <public-pfwg@w3.org
<mailto:public-pfwg@w3.org> >, "'Dominic Mazzoni'" <dmazzoni@google.com
<mailto:dmazzoni@google.com> >, "'Alexander Surkov'"
<surkov.alexander@gmail.com <mailto:surkov.alexander@gmail.com> >, "'David
Bolter'" <dbolter@mozilla.com <mailto:dbolter@mozilla.com> >, "'Cynthia
Shelly'" <cyns@microsoft.com <mailto:cyns@microsoft.com> >
Date: 06/18/2015 04:19 PM
Subject: RE: aria-level a required property for role="heading" or a
supported property  with an RFC SHOULD for authors

  _____  




+1, I have previously suggested that this is the better response (holy cow
James, we're going 2 for 2 :-) ). 

Leonie did some very quick real-time testing during our call, and (she will
correct me if I am wrong) she noted that in Firefox with NVDA (?) when the
level was not specified, it defaulted to "level 2" (which I think is a wrong
decision). Not sure where that decision is happening however, but suspect
it's in the screen reader.

JF


> -----Original Message-----
> From: James Craig [mailto:jcraig@apple.com]
> Sent: Thursday, June 18, 2015 2:14 PM
> To: Joseph Scheuhammer
> Cc: WAI Protocols & Formats; Dominic Mazzoni; Alexander Surkov; David
Bolter;
> Cynthia Shelly
> Subject: Re: aria-level a required property for role="heading" or a
supported
> property with an RFC SHOULD for authors
> 
> VoiceOver used to speak "Heading Level 0, text content" but we fixed that
a few
> years ago. It now speaks "Heading, text content"
> 
> James
> 
> > On Jun 18, 2015, at 2:04 PM, Joseph Scheuhammer <clown@alum.mit.edu
<mailto:clown@alum.mit.edu> >
> wrote:
> >
> > 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 -
> >
>