RE: Nested links (not related to children presentational issue in ARIA 1.1)

>> I have long thought that what we need is the ability for ANY object which can take focus to expose the fact that it has descendants, much like grid cells do today in some UIs.

I second that and not just for descendants. Having elements with role=listitem focused is not uncommon. Doing so, Jaws/IE does not support speaking aria-posinset/setsize on focus although valid properties in ARIA 1.0 for listitem role. I see things like this for years now and we need a more detailed discussion here.

Regards
Stefan



From: James Nurthen [mailto:james.nurthen@oracle.com]
Sent: Freitag, 24. Juni 2016 23:06
To: public-aria@w3.org
Subject: Re: Nested links (not related to children presentational issue in ARIA 1.1)


I have long thought that what we need is the ability for ANY object which can take focus to expose the fact that it has descendants, much like grid cells do today in some UIs. A user could then use a keystroke (or gesture) to switch between interacting with the root object, or its children. This would allow a common UI model to be implemented across all sorts of different components and would resolve many of the tensions we have seen recently where UX patterns are created which aren't supported by the common Accessibility models.

On 6/24/2016 1:44 PM, Amelia Bellamy-Royds wrote:
In response to the feedback & testing results, I'm going to ask the rest of the SVG team to revert the previous decision & to add in explicit language neutering nested <a> elements (so that content still displays but the href is ignored; the nested content would not be its own link).

SVG issue for that: https://github.com/w3c/svgwg/issues/178


Given that it is still possible to create a nested link structure in HTML via JavaScript, I think some follow-up needs to happen on the HTML side to create similar behavior.  Does anyone want to spearhead that, or should I file issues myself?


Longer term discussion for ARIA:

De-facto nested links are actually quite common these days, at least from the perspective of mouse/tap users.  E.g., on the Twitter web site, an entire tweet-block acts like a link to the tweet's permalink page, but spans of text within it are still links to other content.  The outer "link" is constructed through JS click event handlers, rather than actual nested <a> elements.  Nonetheless, the logical structure, and the way it is perceived by end users is that there is one large linked object which contains specific links nested inside it.  However, screen reader users aren't receiving this structure because it cannot be exposed effectively in the ARIA / Accessibility API models.

This is therefore another piece of evidence that ARIA 2 will need a deep discussion on how to support nested interactive content.  The "one element, one role" model, based on the limited number of widgets in desktop APIs of the 1990s, just isn't enough for modern web of rich custom widgets, including composite nested and multi-functional widgets, and including interactive components that also represent document structure such as headings and list items.

~Amelia

On 24 June 2016 at 22:07, Birkir Gunnarsson <birkir.gunnarsson@deque.com<mailto:birkir.gunnarsson@deque.com>> wrote:
This does not work as an html construct (it is invalid after all).
There would have to be extremely urgent and very convincing reasons
why it should be allowed in SVG.

On 6/24/16, White, Jason J <jjwhite@ets.org<mailto:jjwhite@ets.org>> wrote:
>
>> On Jun 24, 2016, at 03:14, Schnabel, Stefan <stefan.schnabel@sap.com<mailto:stefan.schnabel@sap.com>>
>> wrote:
>>
>> Testing of http://mcc.id.au/temp/nested-links.html

>>  The entire construct is treated as a single link in VoiceOver/Safari
>> under OS X, both when navigating with the tab key and when using VoiceOver
>> commands for navigation.
>


--
Regards, James

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