Background on CSS inert - for the call on Wednesday

Dear colleagues,

I wanted to draw APA's attention to some updates on CSS threads that both
APA and TAG have been reviewing. We would like to see if we can put together
some questions from APA on the call on Wednesday, hence emailing about this
ahead of time.

You may recall that APA got flagged in a comment that relates to CSS
scrolling (<https://github.com/w3c/a11y-review/issues/224> - though that's
just for background info, so those of you who looked at that thread have a
point of reference). With respect to that thread, we were trying to figure
out the broader picture. That picture relates to the overall desire to do
carousels declaratively in HTML and CSS. In order to be more
flexible/broadly of use, that feature - carousels - has been split into
several smaller features (which include the scrolling issue we looked at).

There is a TAG design review thread for the full set of proposals
(<https://github.com/w3ctag/design-reviews/issues/1037> - but, again, that's
just for context; relevant links for Wednesday are coming up). The helpful
thing about the TAG thread is that it links to the Explainer for the overall
set of proposals
(<https://github.com/w3c/csswg-drafts/blob/main/css-overflow-5/carousel-expl
ainer.md>). TAG also split out each proposal (e.g. scroll buttons, CSS
inert) into separate design review threads.

The current issue that needs our attention is CSS inert. Here's the TAG
design review thread for CSS inert, which already contains some
accessibility questions and concerns:
<https://github.com/w3ctag/design-reviews/issues/1055> - notably from Martin
(who is a current TAG member) and Alice (who is a former TAG member, and a
key proponent of the Accessibility Object Model work).

Two areas of potential concern, in my words/understanding, seem to be:

1. Accidental over use of inert, and/or accidental escaping of it, due to
the fact that it's not tied to anything visual. Alice made a suggestion as
to how this could be mitigated, but I don't think it has been taken up.

2. Whether there's a risk that web developers might think, based on the
carousel case, that they have to make inert all the things on the page that
aren't currently visible, which would, I think, also stop them from being
focusable.

A couple of key background pieces on this:

As well as the TAG review thread for CSS inert, linked above, which contains
Alice's comment (that in turn links to Alice's detailed write-up
<https://github.com/w3c/csswg-drafts/pull/11178#discussion_r1845716939>),
there's another thread in which CSS WG debated this, which may be of help:
<https://github.com/w3c/csswg-drafts/issues/10711>.

I'm looking through these, but would appreciate if any of you could chime in
on this on the call on Wednesday, or via this email thread if you can't make
it.

Thanks for your time and consideration.

Best regards,


Matthew

Matthew Atkinson
Head of Web Standards
Samsung R&D Institute UK
Samsung Electronics
+44 7733 238 020

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Received on Monday, 10 March 2025 19:44:49 UTC