RE: What's everyone's view on backwards-support, etc for ARIA

Thanks for the replies Jonathan and Steve.

 

Regards

Oscar

 

From: Jonathan Avila [mailto:jon.avila@ssbbartgroup.com] 
Sent: Thursday, 26 February 2015 11:55 PM
To: Oscar Cao; w3c-wai-ig@w3.org
Subject: RE: What's everyone's view on backwards-support, etc for ARIA

 

*  Cannot remember which article it was that said, even though we're using
semantic mark-up we should add in the ARIA roles for older AT that does not
support the new semantic mark-up, since it does no harm, as the role is
still the same.

 

My guess would be that if an AT doesn't support the nav element it might not
support the role of navigation either.  The possible benefit would be from
older browsers like IE 7 or 8 where an HTML5 element might not be supported
by the browser put perhaps the AT is newer and might pull from the DOM the
ARIA role, e.g. with a newer version of JAWS like 14+.

 

So as Steve said you shouldn't do it - but there could be edge cases where
it might provide benefits - IMO you'd want to test those and only add when
needed to provide accessibility support.

 

Jonathan

 

-- 
Jonathan Avila
Chief Accessibility Officer
SSB BART Group 
 <mailto:jon.avila@ssbbartgroup.com> jon.avila@ssbbartgroup.com

 

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From: Oscar Cao [mailto:oscar.cao@live.com] 
Sent: Wednesday, February 25, 2015 11:40 PM
To: w3c-wai-ig@w3.org <mailto:w3c-wai-ig@w3.org> 
Subject: What's everyone's view on backwards-support, etc for ARIA

 

Hello

 

Just skimming through the draft for ARIA in HTML
<https://specs.webplatform.org/html-aria/webspecs/master/>  and I noticed it
says web devs shouldn't use ARIA ROLES to specify the role of an element
which already has that role implied via its native semantics. E.g. <nav
role="navigation"></nav>

 

Cannot remember which article it was that said, even though we're using
semantic mark-up we should add in the ARIA roles for older AT that does not
support the new semantic mark-up, since it does no harm, as the role is
still the same.

 

So what's everyone on this mailing lists' point of view on this?

 

Regards

Oscar