Re: ACTION-1490 proposal says good bye to the "inline" notion for combobox

using aria-activedescendant for aria-controls would be hugely bad. Think live regions where a checkbox controls the content of the live region. 


Rich Schwerdtfeger




> On Feb 11, 2016, at 2:10 PM, Joseph Scheuhammer <clown@alum.mit.edu> wrote:
> 
> Hi Bryan,
> 
> On 2016-02-11 1:03 PM, Bryan Garaventa wrote:
>> The use of aria-controls in this case solves the issue by setting an explicit association, and aria-activedescendant works in identifying the referenced node that is active.
> 
> There may still be a problem -- I am investigating.  The Core-AAM describes an algorithm associated with aria-activedescendant that user agents MUST execute in order to mark the potential active descendants as focusable.  In summary, when the user agent encounters a container with an aria-activedescendant attribute, the user agent must visit all descendants of the container and determine if they could be the target of the container's aria-activedescendant.  The user agent must expose a focusable state for each such target, and only for those descendants that are targets.
> 
> Here "descendants" means either a DOM descendant of the container, or one referenced by aria-owns.  This procedure won't succeed for combobox containers if aria-controls is used instead of aria-owns.
> 
> A way to patch this is to run the exact same algorithm but base it on aria-controls if aria-owns is not used.  However, that requires buy-in from all user agents, and tests cases for the ARIA test harness.
> 
>> I'm getting confused by the reference to modal dialogs. This isn't a modal dialog, it's a Listbox, and focus is never meant to leave the element that includes role=combobox. So what does the modal dialog have to do with it?
> 
> Matt's new definition of combobox includes drop-downs that contain a grid, a treegrid, or a dialog instead of a listbox.  When Rich discussed this with Freedom Scientific, they were willing to handle such cases, but only if the drop-down was modal.  The thread starts here:
> https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-aria/2016Feb/0151.html
> 
> -- 
> ;;;;joseph.
> 
> 'Die Wahrheit ist Irgendwo da Draußen. Wieder.'
>                 - C. Carter -
>