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

I was reading the definition of the step attribute on input+type=range, and I'm uncertain how this applies to ARIA Slider widgets.

E.G According to the step description, 1 by default will say that incrementing by 1 up or down is permitted, or if set to 3, then only moving up or down by 3 is permitted.

So on an ARIA Slider, this would all be handled automatically by the JavaScript, where pressing the Up or Down arrow would programmatically set the aria-valuenow attribute accordingly, so too would dragging the slider handle using the mouse in the onDrag callback function. So even if aria-valuestep had the value such as 3, the JavaScript would still need to do the same thing regardless. Then the aria-valuetext attribute would convey the textual string that is set as the slider value, if this is different than the aria-valuenow attribute within the min/max range.

I may not be understanding the problem though, so can you explain what the extra attribute would do in this case?

Thanks,
Bryan


Bryan Garaventa
Accessibility Fellow
SSB BART Group, Inc.
bryan.garaventa@ssbbartgroup.com
415.624.2709 (o)
www.SSBBartGroup.com

From: James Nurthen [mailto:james.nurthen@oracle.com]
Sent: Tuesday, May 17, 2016 9:03 AM
To: public-aria@w3.org
Subject: Re: aria-valuestep or equivalent needed to make range widgets operable by AT


Windows phones (Win10/Edge) seem to deal fine with ARIA sliders when running with Narrator.
Can we look to see what they are doing in order to enable this without aria-valuestep?

On 5/16/2016 8:37 PM, James Craig 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





--
Regards, James

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