Re: aria-describedat

On Thu, Mar 29, 2012 at 2:36 PM, John Foliot <john@foliot.ca> wrote:
>> That's the key difference.
>> I guess, we could ask if browsers would agree to using alt-enter as
>> the recommended interaction for the new attribute.
>
>
> I think that *might* be one of a few possible strategies, but I would
> caution recommending a single solution, and rather allow for user-agents to
> develop appropriate contextual strategies.

Just think about if we had done the same thing with hyperlinks: left
it to browser vendors to define the interaction. Is that really the
path you want to propose?


> On the Desktop, I think the
> contextual menu is a working and a workable solution for many sighted users
> (Mouse right-click, or for keyboard users Shift+F10 >> Tab to "longdescy
> thing" >> Enter), and/but a screen reader could map that interaction pattern
> to a custom keyboard control (such as Alt+Enter).

Agreed, those are all possibilities. I think we need to propose the
solutions, though, and not leave them to every browser vendor to make
up for themselves. Just think about where that took us wrt accesskey.


> I think that the mobile
> experience might, by necessity be very different however, as the traditional
> mouse/keyboard affordances simply are not there.

Sure - mouse clicks are not that on mobile devices either. But there's
still only one way to activate a link. We need a similar obvious
single solution to activate a link to long text information.


> It would be extremely useful non-the-less if all browsers followed a general
> interaction pattern for inter-op benefits.  I note as well that this does
> not address the discoverability issue, only the interaction issue.

Agreed. I had also proposed solutions for the discoverability issue:
either an on-page indicator (an icon of some sort in the shadow dom)
or an in-browser indicator (similar to how mouse-over often shows you
a preview of the link url somewhere at the bottom of the browser).

Cheers,
Silvia.

Received on Thursday, 29 March 2012 23:23:21 UTC