Re: ARIA and DUAL purpose elements

Birkir,

We have an ARIA 2 issue-1035 Are additional roles or properties needed to
help authors build interactive list and tree structures with complex items?
You might want to add a note in it about aria-actionable.  James Nurthen
has a similar thought on using an attribute to indicate whether the element
contains interactive content or not and this issue should be the home for
both.

                                                              
     Regards,                                                 
                                                              
    Fred Esch                                                 
 Watson, IBM, W3C                                             
  Accessibility                                               
                                                              
 IBM Watson       Watson Release Management and Quality       
                                                              






From: "Birkir Gunnarsson" <birkir.gunnarsson@deque.com>
To: <public-aria@w3.org>
Date: 06/13/2016 12:46 PM
Subject: ARIA and DUAL purpose elements



Greetings

I often come across tabs or menus where if you activate an item it directs
you to a different webpage, but if you mouse over it, it pops open a
submenu.
<a onmouseover=”popoutSubMenu();”” href=http://www.something.com>Insurance
options</a>

Technically, when you map such an element to a menuitem or treeitem, the
user should be able to activate it with an enter key but open the submenu
using the arrow keys.
But the user would not know the difference between a typical menuitem that,
if you press enter, opens a submenu, and a menuitem that, when activated
with enter, navigates user to a different page.

Currently I have insisted that the landing page link be moved into the
submenu, so that when user activates these elements with arrow keys, space
bar or enter, the submenu opens.
Designers are not in love with that idea, and personally I’d rather be able
to either navigate to a page or open a submenu depending on which key I
press.

Since we have looked at introducing new ARIA attributes, I have been
contemplating one called “aria-actionable”.
It would be valid on menuitems and treeitems and indicates that when enter
key is pressed it navigates to a different page, but when arrow down is
pressed, a submenu opens.

I’d rather find a way to accommodate a pattern that is widely used on the
web than telling people not to do it.
I know there are problems with this approach on touch-screen devices (where
user does not have access to a keyboard) but:
      a.       There are touch-screen device issues with other ARIA
      elements and patterns (we’ll get there in ARIA 2.0) and
      b.      This pattern is rarely seen on responsive modes of webpages
      where the navigation menu is simplified.

      I realize this would be an ARIA 2.0 item, it does not fit into our
      current release schedule of ARIA 1.0, but I wanted to throw my
      thought out there before creating an issue.
      Thanks
      -Birkir