Re: aria-current concerns from Apple


> On Sep 14, 2015, at 12:22, Alexander Surkov <surkov.alexander@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Does the concern come from assistive technology developers?

Apparently, the concern comes from Apple’s UA and AT developers.

To reiterate, the concern is that in order to inform the user which item in a list is current when the user navigates to the beginning of the list, the ARIA draft requires an expensive tree traversal operation. The proposal is that aria-current should be an idref on the container element, enabling the node which is current to be identified quickly from the container element.

I think the appropriate accessibility API mapping would be to expose it on the container element and also on the descendant element to which the idref refers (if the proposal is adopted).

> On Fri, Sep 11, 2015 at 3:22 AM, James Craig <jcraig@apple.com> wrote:
> Forwarding some concerns on @aria-current from some of the engineers working on implementation. Note: that the "indicatortype" name was my suggestion, but we're definitely not married to the name. It's also possible the aria-current implementation would be strong enough as just an IDREF pointer without supporting the new token types.
>
>
> Comments from Apple Accessibility Engineering:
>
> > We have a concern with the aria-current proposal in its current form.
> >
> > From an implementation perspective, the specification makes it difficult to do things like announcing the current element in a list when you first navigate to the beginning of that list. This is because aria-current is only exposed on the object that is current, rather than the containing element. A deep traversal is possible, but computationally expensive on initial rendering and when maintaining the model as descendant elements change.
> >
> > The current modal can also lead to author errors if aria-current is modified on all other objects when choosing a new aria-current. For example, what is the expectation when a list has two elements that both claim to be "current"?
> >
> > New proposal:
> >
> > aria-indicatortype="TOKEN( page | date | ... )" on the leaf element.
> >       remains the token based list of options
> >
> > aria-current="IDREF" on the container element
> >       its value should be the ID of the object that is current, which must be a descendant of the container.
> >
> > Thanks for considering.
>
>
>
>
>


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Received on Monday, 14 September 2015 16:33:40 UTC