Re: @aria-describedat at-risk in ARIA 1.1 heartbeat draft

On Fri, Dec 5, 2014 at 5:16 PM, John Foliot <john@foliot.ca> wrote:

> James Craig wrote:
> >
> > > Dominic wrote:
> > >
> > >> I have no strong opinion on supporting longdesc and/or aria-
> > describedat for exclusive use by screen readers or other AT - i.e. as
> > something that'd be invisible to most users.
> > >>
> > >> One thing I feel more strongly about: until now, everything in ARIA
> > only affects how the user agent communicates with AT, it never changes
> > the visual layout or the semantics of how the page works for users who
> > aren't running any AT. Exposing aria-describedat in the context menu
> > would be a significant departure from this. One potential concern is
> > that web developers would become more suspicious of ARIA in general and
> > not want to apply simple accessibility bug fixes without worrying about
> > the implications for their design.
> >
> >
> > I've expressed the same concern with aria-describedat, in addition to
> > the concerns Ted listed in the formal objection to longdesc.
>
> ...and yet, Dominic himself closed the @longdesc bug in Chromium just
> yesterday:
> https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=224285#c40


Yes, I'm still in favor of native longdesc support, this is the first step
in that direction. The extension will hopefully graduate to a built-in but
optional feature, and then a default feature, if we see evidence that web
authors are increasing adoption of it and using it correctly.

A question to Dominic and Alexander, since they have both been singled out
> as commenter's, do your respective organizations have any specific issue
> with treating the "UI interaction" of aria-describedat with the same or
> similar solution you have applied to @longdesc (given that the draft spec
> does not specify any explicit UI requirements)? While I know that some are
> still not 100% satisfied with the Chromium "plugin" requirement, I
> personally have heard no complaints with moving the interaction into the
> context menu.
>

I'm perfectly happy with exposing aria-describedat to AT via accessibility
APIs. Unlike with longdesc, I don't like the idea of exposing
aria-describedat in the context menu by default. The reason is that up
until now, ARIA does not change the behavior of the user agent at all. It
simply passes additional information to AT. The browser doesn't render
anything differently, respond to events differently, or anything else like
that. Suggesting that the browser directly expose aria-describedat to all
users would totally change that, and I worry it would set a bad precedent.

I hope that helps.