Re: [1.2T LC] should @role in SVG be animatable?

Al Gilman:

....
>Can anybody come up with a use case for animating the @role value  
>using the currently-defined roles from either the XHTML Role Module  
>or WAI-ARIA?

Just my personal ideas about it as anybody often using 
declarative animations in SVG documents:

For example an author indicates a desc or title element as a tooltip
using the role attribute as some kind of fallback.
Within the SVG document, the author tests (switch, conditional processing
or simply by using declarative animation)
whether the viewer is able to interprete declarative animation or not, 
if this is the case, the author provides some advanced (more decorative) 
own tooltip construction using declarative animation.
Because role="tooltip" on title/desc in this case is not required anymore, 
the author sets this attribute value to something different (description,
heading), to avoid, that both tooltips come up, the more decorative and 
the simple and in this case superfluous title/desc role tooltip.

Well, hopefully authors use this only for such more useful scenarios and
not for something stupid ;o)
But the alternative approach for the above example without an animatable
role would be simply to skip the role attribute completely, not to care about
incomplete implementations and just to provide the more decorative own 
tooltip with declarative animation, because declarative animation is not
optional and there is no need to care about users of incomplete 
implementation with some 'fallback' role="tooltip"
("Why don't they just use the stuff, I tested all my 'amazing' things
with?" ;o) and this alternative approach is much worse than simply to
animate the role, if necessary.
Even worse would be to use scripting to remove the role, because for
SVG is no specific scripting language required and the scripting 
capabilities are not related to the declarative animation capabilities
of the viewer. I have seen often similar stupid things with
HTML+CSS+javascript generating inaccessible projects without
CSS or javascript interpretation.



Note, that the indication about  animatability for an attribute or
property is not related to scripting, it is declarative animation. 
Obviously it is always a good idea to provide some meaningful 
text alternative for any SVG document, including those with 
declarative animation ;o) Else many people will not get the 
intentions of the (animated) graphics anyway for quite
different reasons.


Olaf

Received on Monday, 29 September 2008 15:25:14 UTC