RE: Objection to password role

From: Richard Schwerdtfeger [mailto:richschwer@gmail.com]
Sent: Tuesday, June 21, 2016 12:38 PM

People are doing this already. One example is what if you want the user to see the password they are typing based on their request? You are not going to do that with the HTML password unless you write it elsewhere. Our argument is that people are doing this already. CSS does things that encourages people to break accessibility too. That does not stop them from putting it out the door. JavaScript encouraged people to create custom controls that were not accessible. We invented ARIA. We did not say Don’t do that. Also, it is much more work to do something other than use an HTML password so why would they do it unless they needed to provide additional functionality? I challenge you to tell developers not to use JavaScript because it encourages them to create things that are inaccessible.

I would also argue that putting role=“password” on an element does nothing advance the work of someone trying to create a custom password. So, it encourages nothing. In fact, John Foliot placed some excellent warning text about this to address that point which was passed as a decision.

[Jason] What I don’t understand in this entire discussion is why some people seem to think that adding a password role would make the situation described in the above quote by Rich worse than it is now. Adding the role would make the custom password widgets more accessible, which can only be desirable. We’ve already addressed the question of how assistive technologies should implement it, and I haven’t noticed any attempt to reopen that issue.

To be clear, I don’t want to see the progress of ARIA 1.1 toward Candidate Recommendation delayed by continued controversy over this feature. I do not object to the inclusion of the password role, but I don’t mind if it’s deferred to ARIA 2.0 (not, as should be clear, that I’m advocating such deferral).


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