What is accessible name? (Was: Regarding the accessible name calculation for aria-label within links?)

James Craig, Wed, 05 Feb 2014 23:48:14 -0800:
> In summary, while I would agree with you that all screen readers can 
> and should continue to improve support for these interfaces, this 
> particular issue may or may not be something that can be considered a 
> “bug” within the context of ARIA, because ARIA only defines web 
> content structure and browser to API mappings. ARIA does not decree 
> any specific behavior of assistive technologies like screen readers. 
> It may very well be a bug, but you'd need to convince the NVDA team 
> of that, not a W3C Working Group.

Not sure, but may be part of the problem is understanding what 
”Accessible Name” and the accessible name calculation is and does - and 
is not and does not.

The definition of ”Accessible Name” consists of the term to be 
explained plus two paragraphs: 

   http://www.w3.org/TR/wai-aria/complete#def_accessible_name


But what is the accessible name of those two very paragraphs? 

Usually  a name is just a short reference to ”the thing itself”, which 
is longer or even different. (E.g. a name of a person is not the living 
person itself.) Assuming this is how it is in ARIA too, I miss a 
definition of ”normal text/content”. And of ”accessible description” 
to. And of ”presented text/content”, which might be yet another thing.

Moving attention to the ”Accessible Name Calculation”, I think that 
section should inform readers about whether the calculated name is what 
AT users get. Perhaps more clearly: Is it so that ”we others” get text, 
while AT users get ”accessible names”? 

E.g. the spec could say that ”the purpose of ARIA is to calculate 
accessible names, which can be presented to the user as the content”. 
Or spec could say ”accessible names is not all users get - it is just 
one aspect of what they get. User also get, x, y Z.”.

Something like this could perhaps help people who file bugs against AT 
to file precise bugs. Currently the calculation text says that ”The 
text alternative is reused in both the name and description 
computation, as described above.” Here we have two kinds of text - 
“name“ and ”description”. But don’t user also get ”content” - things 
that are ”the thing itself” and not just names and descriptions of the 
thing? This is one of the things I wonder about when read the name 
calculation section. I roughly understand how it works for e.g. a <img> 
element. (Knock on wood.) But I am uncertain when it comes to e.g. a 
long paragraph - is its content then the accessible name? And can the 
accessible name be longer than the content?

Ian Hickson was quite clever, I think, in getting into HTML5 how things 
are more complicated than one might be attempted to think. E.g. look at 
how he defined what paragraph is, in HTML. The p element is not the 
only way to have paragraphs in HTML.
-- 
Leif Halvard Silli

Received on Thursday, 6 February 2014 09:26:11 UTC