"feed" specific defense from Rich (Was: ARIA WG Guidelines to avoid scope creep (Was: article navigation))

Cc Matt King for the Facebook justification Rich mentioned.

> On Dec 2, 2015, at 6:45 AM, Richard Schwerdtfeger <schwer@us.ibm.com> wrote:
> 
> James, 
> 
> Facebook is the MOST widely used application in the  industry with over 1 Billion users and more people use this application world wide than virtually anything else. One of the issues up front was to address an issue whereby we needed a dynamic list. If you recall Matt King asked very early for the ability to identify a list as a list was too restrictive. Twitter also has a feed so if you add that the number of people that would be using this feature is huge.

And email threaded views can be similar, etc. I don't disagree that the content exits, but I'm trying to understand what problem you're attempting to solve. As best I can determine, the need is for an AT navigational feature, not necessarily a new ARIA role.

Matt, are these fair assumptions?

1. Desktop implementations currently solve the lack of "next/previous" navigation events by incorporating de facto "j/k" keypress events.

2. Some mobile implementations solve this by implementing simple headings. (In FB's case this is insufficient because each article can have multiple headings.)

3. In mobile assistive technologies, there is no good way to support de facto keypress navigation across platforms, so you'd like quicker navigation between articles that does not overload the landmark menu. (e.g. vertical flicks in the iOS VO rotor)

If those assumptions are correct, wouldn't navigating to all articles suffice, regardless of a feed container? If not, and you need to navigate to the beginning and end of the section, what benefit does "feed>article...n" have over "main>article...n" and "complementary>article...n"

Is the goal for ATs to provide generic container navigation?

James


> Also, most mobile operating systems add special features to better integrate Facebook and Twitter into them -iOS included. The group reconciled on addressing this by introducing a feed. There is nothing speculative about this and waiting for an ARIA 2.0, which will be a very long time out is not acceptable. Countless hours were spent before and after TPAC for which you made no comments on prior and during TPAC. Unfortunately, addressing the issue took a long time. The feed is a very simple way to do that and I would argue there is nothing speculative about it. 
> 
> If we were going to be critical I would say the most unnecessary addition to ARIA 1.1 was Switch. This could be represented as a checkbox.  It does not take a rocket scientist to determine that if you had Lights checked or not checked to determine that the lights are being turned on or off. In my mind we bent the rules to do it but like the dynamic list it was identified as an issue at the start if ARIA 1.1. That is my opinion but obviously the group agree to put it in. 
> 
> ARIA 2.0 is going to be a much bigger animal and it will require us to look at a lot of things including integration with an actual API that will allow for device independent interaction. 
> 
> I don't thint that feed is a huge add to a platform. In particular articles are already supported by platforms. We are talking about one container role that indicates that the list of articles can be infinite and it tells the user that they will have the abiltity to navigate amont the articles (what we asked for in the dynamic list in the first paragraph) in the first few months of doing ARIA 1.1.
> 
> So, I disagree that this was not something we had asked for at the beginning. I don't agree that it it is out of scope. 
> 
> This is not a giant addition to ARIA. All the platforms already support article. Firefox already implemented posinset and setsize on articles. All this is is a container that says the list is dynamic. 
> 
> A critical thing that needs to be addressed for any release, no matter how minor, is can we actually afford to wait for 3-4 years for another release for a feature.
> 
> Rich
> 
> 
> Rich Schwerdtfeger
> 
> James Craig ---12/02/2015 03:25:26 AM---(BCC PFWG list. If you want to continue this thread, join the ARIA list.) James Craig wrote:
> 
> From:	James Craig <jcraig@apple.com>
> To:	"public-aria@w3.org" <public-aria@w3.org>
> Cc:	Michael Cooper <cooper@w3.org>, Janina Sajka <janina@rednote.net>
> Date:	12/02/2015 03:25 AM
> Subject:	ARIA WG Guidelines to avoid scope creep (Was: article navigation)
> 
> 
> 
> (BCC PFWG list. If you want to continue this thread, join the ARIA list.)
> 
> James Craig wrote:
> PS. "feed" seems a out-of-scope for a 1.1 criteria, does it not? Why is a list of articles in a feed more or less semantic than a list of article outside a feed? Does the end user need to know about the difference? If not, cut it.
> 
> I'd like to make a case for extremely critical analysis of which new features make it into ARIA 1.1. My recollection is that the 1.1 release was intended to be a quick errata and oversights release, but we're nearing (over?) 2 years of work already.
> 
> I propose creating a list of guidelines the ARIA Working Group can use when considering any new role or feature. The Chair and Staff Contact should use this list of criteria to enforce scope and maintain a reasonable timeline for deliverables. I've started a first draft:
> 
> Guideline 1. If the role is a subclass (e.g. checkbox -> switch, or textbox -> searchbox), the ARIA Working Group MUST NOT add the role unless there is a significant *user* benefit to using the subclass role instead of the superclass role. Criteria to determine role worthiness may include (A) commonality of the UI (e.g. switches and search fields are extremely common in mainstream UI) and (B) determination of whether the use of the superclass role causes confusion that is not experienced by a sighted user (e.g. switch labels are often phrased such that "checked/unchecked" statuses are ambiguous to an AT user, but an "on/off" status is understandable. "Bathroom light, checked checkbox" is ambiguous where "Bathroom light, on" is not.)
> 
> Guideline 2. The ARIA Working Group SHOULD NOT add a new roles or ARIA features based on speculative future UI behavior of assistive technology. Justification: ARIA 1.0 included some features that were exposed to the API layer to achieve exit criteria, but were never completely implemented by assistive technologies. Exception: The ARIA Working Group MAY propose speculative roles and other ARIA features to support mainstream UI elements that are *unique* to the Web and unlikely to be implemented in native platform UI. (Note: I can't immediately think of a current example that would allow this exception.)
> 
> Guideline 3. For minor release numbers (e.g. ARIA 1.1), the ARIA Working Group SHOULD NOT add new features unless there is existing AT support for equivalent native platform features. In order to maintain scope and a reasonable timeline, the ARIA Working Group SHOULD postpone proposing such features until the next major release (e.g. ARIA 2.0). Justification: Exit criteria for minor version spec releases should not be delayed due to expectations of brand new platform API and AT support that could delay the spec for years.
> 
> For example, if there is no equivalent to a "feed" role on any native platform, completing it will require the spec editor to solidify prose, then require platform API reviewers to create a new role to match, then require rendering engines to support the new role, then require assistive technologies to support the user feature, before the minor release (e.g. ARIA 1.1) can finally ship. This could add years to the spec process... Not a wise goal for an .1 spec release. In my opinion, the design-by-spec-committee model also flies contrary to the goals of the W3C, which is only chartered to work on cross-platform technical standardization. 
> 
> Do other members of the ARIA group think this type of Guidelines list is worth pursuing?
> 
> Thanks,
> James
> 
> 
>