Proposal for aria-detailstype
Online word processors often have a way of commenting or annotating a piece of text, that need to be exposed in accessibility APIs to assistive technologies. We need a way to markup comments and suggested changes in documents.
Here's the proposal:
When using aria-details, you can add an optional attribute aria-detailstype on the same element with one of the following values: commenting, suggesting, identifying, describing (default) — these are imported from the web annotations motivation vocabulary.
Possible values for future discussion:
- Additional values from the web annotations motivation vocabulary: editing, highlighting, linking, moderating, questioning, replying, tagging. These need use cases and examples.
- Additional custom types such as "breakpoint" needed for web-based code editors.
- Ideas from personalization spec.
Benefits: a new string attribute is very simple to implement in browsers, AAM's and AT's. Firefox probably already exposes the detailstype object attribute since it exposes any aria-foo attribute automatically.
Example in an editor:
(View source to see markup)
Cats are liquid BTW
—Ms. Commenting