Rationale for aria-errormessage

• From: Sailesh Panchang <sailesh.panchang@deque.com>
• Date: Mon, 25 Jul 2016 16:42:19 -0400
• To: public-aria@w3.org
• Message-ID: <CAJi9CqpaNCHDgiUK=ae7xTcLtKU--E=f5Gv8j38iMHroKxRFYw@mail.gmail.com>

Aria-errormessage:
The rationale for including this is not documented.
It is merely a special case of aria-describedby and is burdened  with
the requirement of aria-invalid.
If the programmatically associated message conveys it is an error or
that input is invalid, why burden SR users with output of aria-invalid
too?
See ARIA21 ... aria-invalid can be used without a separate message
like in example#1 and as noted is not always needed.
Developers / testers need to be better trained in use of
aria-describedby for error messaging. And in any case using
aria-describedby for this purpose can never be wrong or fail WCAG2.
Aria-errormessage will confuse developers / testers and some will use
describedby  and some the new one  and users will suffer till user
agents and AT makers decide to provide uniform support for
aria-errormessage.

Sailesh Panchang

Received on Monday, 25 July 2016 20:42:49 UTC