RE: ARIA roles for graphics

From: White, Jason J [mailto:jjwhite@ets.org] 
Sent: 26 May 2015 16:53

> On May 25, 2015, at 19:19, chaals@yandex-team.ru wrote:
>> • icon
>> • A graphical element which conveys a simple concept or category using a symbolic image.
>> • Differs from an image in that a short name is all that is expected; a detailed description of the visual representation is not required to convey the meaning of the icon.
>> • Children are presentational -- an icon is an atomic element.  It should never have component parts with interactivity of their own descriptions -- use "graphic" instead.
>> • The fallback role would be img.
>> • This could be the default role for <use>, so that authors would have to explicitly over-ride the role if they wanted the browser to include the cloned content in the accessibility tree.
>>
> I'm not sure about the last point - I'd like to see it explained in terms of use cases and requirements, but otherwise this makes a lot of sense.

I think the argument would be that the essential information about an icon is what it represents rather than the details of its visual appearance. The latter may however be useful to know in some contexts, thus I would suggest including a brief description in DESC and a label designating the purpose of the icon in TITLE. Unfortunately, this would preclude providing help text usable as a tool tip in DESC. 

The most basic use case, is needing to know what an object is. The icon role would seem to satisfy this case.

The rest is authoring practice. Knowing what an icon represents is definitely essential, and this could be accomplished with something like:

<svg role="icon" aria-label="Delete">...</svg>

I'm less sure that the use case for a description is strong enough. It would be good to gather some quantative data to work with if we can.

I also have reservations about recommending <title> as an authoring mechanism to provide help.

A scratch browser test this morning suggests that only Firefox renders <title> as a tooltip. Chrome, IE and Safari don't, and as a Webkit based browser I suspect Opera is unlikely to either.

When it is rendered, <title> has the same UI as @title in HTML, so it comes with all the same accessibility/usability issues [1].

Returning to the original thread, I agree with Chaals that some explanation of Ameila's last point would be helpful:

>> • This could be the default role for <use>, so that authors would have to explicitly over-ride the role if they wanted the browser to include the cloned content in the accessibility tree.

Not sure if this is suggesting that img would be the default role? If so, why wouldn't an object with a role of img be in the acc tree already? Also not sure what content is/would be cloned?



Léonie.
[1] http://www.paciellogroup.com/blog/2013/01/using-the-html-title-attribute-updated/

Received on Wednesday, 27 May 2015 12:15:44 UTC