- From: James Craig <jcraig@apple.com>
- Date: Sat, 01 Feb 2014 01:06:58 -0800
- To: Joanmarie Diggs <jdiggs@igalia.com>
- Cc: Cynthia Shelly <cyns@microsoft.com>, Bryan Garaventa <bryan.garaventa@whatsock.com>, "T.V Raman" <raman@google.com>, "jongund@illinois.edu" <jongund@illinois.edu>, "jason@jasonjgw.net" <jason@jasonjgw.net>, "wai-xtech@w3.org" <wai-xtech@w3.org>, "w3c-wai-pf@w3.org WAI-PFWG" <w3c-wai-pf@w3.org>
On Jan 31, 2014, at 11:14 AM, Joanmarie Diggs <jdiggs@igalia.com> wrote: > Silly question: Why not role="div"? Three reasons for me: 1. It’s too specific to HTML. ARIA works in many host languages. You can use it in any rendered XML (for example SVG), so I’m not fond of the idea of naming ARIA roles after HTML tag names. 2. <div> is not semantically meaningless. Granted, it’s semantically *vague*, but the tag name is intended to designate a “division” in markup. Sometimes these divisions are meaningful, and sometimes they aren’t. 3. User agents, knowing that divs are sometimes meaningful, use heuristics to determine whether to expose one to platform accessibility APIs as a generic grouping container, which is not the same as an element that has been explicitly designated as semantically meaningless. If we say that role="div" is a synonym of role="presentation", we’re implying that <div>s should never be exposed to accessibility APIs, which is likely to break a lot of things. My top contenders so far are “none”, “null”, and the empty string (“”).
Received on Saturday, 1 February 2014 09:07:29 UTC