FW: Update to ARIA processing change proposal ISSUE-199

Resending with Michael Cooper in the To: field and the A11Y TF in the CC: field.  I recommend that discussion take place on the public-html@w3.org<mailto:public-html@w3.org> email at:
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html/2012Jun/0112.html

/paulc

Paul Cotton, Microsoft Canada
17 Eleanor Drive, Ottawa, Ontario K2E 6A3
Tel: (425) 705-9596 Fax: (425) 936-7329

From: Edward O'Connor [mailto:eoconnor@apple.com]
Sent: Friday, June 22, 2012 9:00 PM
To: HTML WG
Subject: Re: Update to ARIA processing change proposal ISSUE-199

Hi,

Michael Cooper wrote:

I have updated the ISSUE-199 Change Proposal on ARIA processing, following guidance from the 3 May 2012 discussion and incorporating much of Ted O'Connor's counter proposal. I believe this version covers the agreement of that meeting. Some details of HTML-style spec language may need to be tweaked.

http://www.w3.org/html/wg/wiki/ChangeProposals/ARIA_Processing

This revised proposal is definitely much closer to something that I think we could find consensus on. Some notes:

There's no rationale provided for the changes proposed in the section titled "Clarify the existing ARIA section." As the change appears entirely editorial, I'd rather we leave it out of a consensus proposal.

The text of the "Role attribute" section closely matches the text of my proposal. There are two differences:

1. The proposed spec section is titled "Role Attribute," whereas in my proposal it's titled "The ARIA role attribute." Because of the historical origins of the name of WAI-ARIA's role="" attribute in the XHTML Role Attribute Module, I think it's helpful to consistently refer to the attribute in spec text as "the ARIA role attribute" to avoid the implication that the attribute is intended as a generalized vehicle with which to imbue elements with additional semantics.

2. The "split on spaces" paragraph isn't marked as an implementor-only section. It probably should be, but I doubt this is an area of intentional disagreement.

In terms of normative statements, I have no objection to the text in the section titled "State and Property Attributes." That said, I find this text hard to understand, so I would prefer a consensus proposal describe the normative requirements and defer to the editor for the precise wordsmithing.


Thanks,
Ted