RE: exposing new roles to platform

+1 for FF way. In my opinion, IE "borrows" here a property designated for another purpose.

Question: What will happen with IE8 on Windows 7 in such cases?

- Stefan

-----Original Message-----
From: wai-xtech-request@w3.org [mailto:wai-xtech-request@w3.org] On Behalf Of David Bolter
Sent: Monday, December 14, 2009 2:46 AM
To: wai-xtech@w3.org
Subject: exposing new roles to platform

In dealing with web content browsers need to expose roles that do not 
have reasonable match/mapping on the desktop. When exposing such roles 
in MSAA, Firefox has adopted the technique of returning a string instead 
of an enumerated value; which is possible because get_accRole has an 
in/out VARIANT type. I think IE exposes such roles in the 
get_accDescription.

I'm biased and like the way Firefox does it because it allows AT to 
always call get_accRole to discover the role, and leaves 
get_accDescription free for such things as aria-describedby etc.

Thoughts?

Note this isn't an issue for more modern desktop API (ATK, IAccessible2, 
UIA etc).

cheers,
David

Received on Monday, 14 December 2009 06:52:44 UTC