Re: Action-1293 Proposal

Hey Alex.

On 03/18/2015 09:42 PM, Alexander Surkov wrote:

>     What if there are gaps? Would you make everything explicit like this:
> 
>        <div role="row">
>          <span role="gridcell" aria-colindex="3">Jane</span>
>          <span role="gridcell" aria-colindex="4">Jones</span>
>          <span role="gridcell" aria-colindex="5">Acme, Inc.</span>
>          <span role="gridcell" aria-colindex="9">555-1234</span>
>        </div>
> 
>     Or would you only indicate where the gaps are, like:
> 
>        <div role="row">
>          <span role="gridcell" aria-colindex="3">Jane</span>
>          <span role="gridcell">Jones</span>
>          <span role="gridcell">Acme, Inc.</span>
>          <span role="gridcell" aria-colindex="9">555-1234</span>
>        </div>
> 
> 
> these two should be equivalent, if aria-colindex is omitted then cell
> index equals previous cell index + 1.

Yes, they should be equivalent. That isn't my question. ;) My question
is: Should our specification provide authors with that option?

> If aria-colindex is lesser or
> equals to previous colindex then it's ignored.

Oh that reminds me, I re-read your proposed text about that. I have a
counter proposal which I forgot to ask you about:

<proposed statement>
Authors MUST set the value for aria-colindex to an integer greater than
or equal to 1, greater than the aria-colindex value of any previous
elements within that same row, and less than or equal to the number of
columns in the full table.
</proposed statement>

In other words, user agents don't ignore; authors don't give you bogus
values in the first place. :) Thoughts?

>     What if we give Jane a colleague and toss in a row span, so that the
>     explicit values would be:
> 
>        <div role="row">
>          <span role="gridcell" aria-colindex="3">Jane</span>
>          <span role="gridcell" aria-colindex="4">Jones</span>
>          <span role="gridcell" aria-colindex="5" aria-rowspan="2">Acme,
>     Inc.</span>
>          <span role="gridcell" aria-colindex="9">555-1234</span>
>        </div>
>        <div role="row">
>          <span role="gridcell" aria-colindex="3">John</span>
>          <span role="gridcell" aria-colindex="4">Smith</span>
>          <span role="gridcell" aria-colindex="9">555-1235</span>
>        </div>
> 
>     What would the resulting implicit/duplicate-free version look like?
> 
> 
> This is a new scenario we didn't consider yet so far. I thought that
> only continue set of rows or columns may be missed. So is it valid
> scenario when each row can contain different subsets of missed rows?

They are not different subsets. At least not in my mind. Both rows have
columns 3, 4, 5, and 9. But in the first row, the cell in column 5 has a
rowspan of 2.

Having said all that.... The questions I ask are genuine questions in
which I genuinely want your input and the input of others, and plan to
listen to everything you all say. :) But what's admittedly running
through my mind -- and what motivated these questions -- is this: I
think we want to be careful about values implied as a result of author
omission. There's too much chance for confusion and author error. And as
you know, when authors make errors on non-HTML tables, there's an
excellent chance we're going to wind up with completely broken
accessible tables. CSS taught us that.

Mind you, I DO think we can -- and should -- make authors lives easier,
for instance by moving the count properties to the table, and by making
the rowindex a property of the row (leaving it up to the user agents to
expose it on the cell for those platforms where doing so is expected). I
do not, however, think that colindex is a property where we should be
doing that.

--joanie

Received on Thursday, 19 March 2015 02:13:35 UTC