ARIA on ARIA [Was: [DPUB-ARIA] agenda 20150430]

In posting the agenda for the DPUB-ARIA call this week, Tzviya has
calendered discussion of ARIA's intended scope. This question comes up
frequently. Unfortunately, it is also often inaccurately answered.

I thought it might be helpful to cite, for the record, what the
ARIA 1.0 recommendation has to say on the subject.

Siegman, Tzviya - Hoboken writes:
> Agenda:
> 1. Clarify for editors the purpose of ARIA (including modules):
> 
> * Is ARIA purely and exclusively an A11y mechanism (ie, that is their only decision criteria for allowing terms into the vocabulary)
> 
> * Is ARIA a more general mechanism (what publishing has called structural semantics) that is also synchronized with a11y and ATs
> 
At http://www.w3.org/TR/wai-aria/introduction#ua-support the ARIA 1.0
specification, a W3C recommendation, describes itself as follows:

"The WAI-ARIA specification neither requires or forbids user agents from
enhancing native presentation and interaction behaviors on the basis of
WAI-ARIA markup.  Mainstream user agents might expose WAI-ARIA
navigational landmarks (for example, as a dialog box or through a
keyboard command) with the intention to facilitate navigation for all
users. User agents are encouraged to maximize their usefulness to users,
including users without disabilities."

It is historically true that ARIA's adoption was strongly aided by
implementers' understanding that they were not required to use aria for
all their product's users, but rather to expose ARIA to assistive
technology users via accessibility APIs. This is indeed the
case--They're not required.  However, the above statement, still present
in current ARIA-1.1 drafts, clearly invites them to do so.

My view is that the very fact this question is posed as frequently as it
is, simply testifies to  ARIA's value to non AT users as well as to AT
users.

Janina


-- 

Janina Sajka,	Phone:	+1.443.300.2200
			sip:janina@asterisk.rednote.net
		Email:	janina@rednote.net

Linux Foundation Fellow
Executive Chair, Accessibility Workgroup:	http://a11y.org

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI)
Chair,	Protocols & Formats	http://www.w3.org/wai/pf
	Indie UI			http://www.w3.org/WAI/IndieUI/

Received on Wednesday, 29 April 2015 15:36:09 UTC