Re: [w3c/webcomponents] Extensibility: How should we best support accessible Custom widgets and interactivity with ARIA? (#553)

@richschwer wrote:

> People's names have been used without really fully having committed to the effort. 

At the face-to-face meeting, all the attendees agreed to list their names as editors. Cynthia @cyns was not in attendance, but had contributed enough to the lead-in API discussions and WAPA that Bogdan @boggydigital requested she be left on the list. It may be more accurate to refer to the list as "authors" rather than "editors" based on their active and prior contributions. If anyone wants their names removed, we're happy to do so. Everyone listed has editor privileges, so they're welcome to make additional changes, too.

> The attributions are very misleading.

I believe you're mistaken, and that there is no way for you to know this. In any case, your suggestion that this is Google-only proposal is just completely untrue. Here's a little more history to fill in the gaps.

The idea started as an incubation effort between browser implementors, and we've had active discussions since around January of this year. Dominic Mazzoni (@minorninth) noticed that several prior efforts (Intentional Events, IndieUI, WAPA, some RTE features, Mozilla's AAPI proposal) had been attempted within the normal W3C process and had failed due to a number of reasons. Among them, implementation problems too late in the process, scope bloat, vendor-specific API style, etc. Nevertheless, Dominic M and @Alice Boxhall spotted that we were all trying to solve the same problems and suggested we work amongst ourselves to bring a shared proposal to the table. @cyns is the one who originally suggested the WICG.  

In the Spring, we had active email discussions of the pros and cons of the different proposals, and started focusing the effort for a minimum viable product that we could all live with. The API discussions included participation by every major browser vendor prior to anything being committed to a spec draft.

We had a face-to-face meeting in May. The active contributors in that face-to-face were:

- Alex Surkov, Mozilla
- Bogdan Brinza, Microsoft
- Alice Boxhall, Google
- Dominic Mazzoni, Google 
- James Craig (me), Apple

The Accessibility Object Model (AOM) spec is the culmination of the effort from that meeting. Each of the people listed contributed to the draft, regardless of whether they explicitly made edits in the Github repo. A number of changes were made at Bogdan's request because he thought the initial ideas may not be implementable in Edge. A number of ideas were based on Alex's draft of AAPI, or my contributions to IndieUI, or Cynthia's work on WAPA.

Since that time, @minorninth put the technical draft to paper, and I primarily contributed the process sections: Introduction and Inclusion/Exclusion/Objection criteria. The group discussion slowed this Summer due to company-focused conferences (I/O, WWDC, etc) and beta cycles for upcoming releases. 

At this point, there are proof-of-concept patches for both Chrome and Firefox, and we have implementation plans in WebKit. We put out the call for comment to other engineers within each company for, which is how Domenic D heard about it. Within Google, Domenic D @domenic and Alex Russell @slightlyoff submitted comments. Within Mozilla, Marcos @marcoscaceres has made a number of comments and Alex Surkov @asurkov has contributed heavily. Within Apple, about half a dozen members of the Standards, WebKit, and Accessibility Engineering teams have reviewed the drafts, and I've been submitting changes or comments on their behalf. 

Hopefully this history alleviates your concern that the Accessibility Object Model (AOM) proposal was not a joint effort. We just hadn't formally announced it because it wasn't yet ready. It's almost ready now, so I added AOM as a topic proposal for Wednesday's technical plenary at TPAC in Lisbon, and was planning to propose it as an agenda item for the ARIA F2F, too. I'm happy to give a summary in one of the upcoming ARIA meetings, too.


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