Re: aria-valuestep or equivalent needed to make range widgets operable by AT

Thank you for raising this issue. We are trying to lock down ARIA 1.1 for June as HTML 5.1 and SVG2 are all trying to lock down. This is also an objective of our group. We lost a minimum of 3 months in addressing charter issues. 

If we are going to address this issue and it is really necessary we should consider a very small ARIA 1.2. I checked with Freedom Scientific today and they do not, for any browser or native Windows application announce step information. Additionally, MSAA/IA2 used by both Firefox and Chrome does not have a step value in its value interface. We would need to either create a modification to the value interface or we would need to stick it in an object attribute. Then we would need to convince at least one AT that it is important to provide the information. 

I am not saying this does not have value. However, introducing a new issue now would cause all of this work to get out of synch. We are trying to lock down:

SVG2 Accessibility
HTML 5.1 Accessibility
ARIA 1.1
ARIA DPUB
ARIA Graphics

and all the associated mapping specifications. We are also looking at creating automated testing. Our plate is full. 

I recommend we make this an ARIA 2.0 issue and then decide if we should make an ARIA 1.2 (a very limited release) and then discuss whether we bring this in. Getting this all resolved from APIs to ATs to the spec. will take some time. 

What is extremely important is that we lock down ARIA 1.1 and get working on Web Components as well as a JavaScript accessibility API which many browser vendors want. The charter delay set us back 3 months in getting on that. I would like to really be able to focus on Web Components at TPAC. 

Rich




> On May 16, 2016, at 10:37 PM, James Craig <jcraig@apple.com> wrote:
> 
> ARIA group,
> 
> A long-standing problem with ARIA sliders is that they can only be made partially accessible, and only on keyboard-based interfaces. There have been some recent brainstorms and discussions about what it would require to make custom ARIA sliders directly operable by AT (for example, on touch screen devices). 
> 
> One of the missing links is an a direct equivalent to the @step attribute on <input type="range">. 
> 
> Please consider adding @aria-valuestep (or an equivalent attr) for range widgets such as sliders. Ideally this would be an addition to ARIA 1.1 to match HTML and allow for future AT support.
> 
> Thanks,
> James Craig
> 
>

Received on Tuesday, 17 May 2016 14:59:32 UTC