RE: Objection to password role

From: John Foliot [mailto:john.foliot@deque.com]

No worries, we now have James here who *is* an Apple person. I know that Apple traditionally does not state if or when they plan on doing anything specific, although James your continued input into this discussion is I think valuable.

It is apparent that for this to "work" as scoped we will need the screen reader vendors onboard, and lack of 'support' in Voiceover would be a significant issue going forward. We currently have indication that ORCA (via Joanie) will support this, and it has been stated that Freedom Scientific are working on supporting this in JAWs, however there are significantly more screen readers in the marketplace then there are browsers, and so that is yet another troubling scenario - without widespread support this will not even address the problem it alledges to be addressing.

If a screen reader doesn’t support the password role, then it seems to me that the outcome can’t be worse than a situation in which the author chooses to implement a custom password widget and there is no password role with which to make it accessible using ARIA.

That is, defining the role improves the status quo for users of screen readers which support it, without making the situation worse for others.

We already have a CFC on this which passed and I would rather avoid yet another lengthy controversy on the subject.


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