Re: Call for consensus - longdesc to CR

> On Jul 25, 2014, at 8:05 PM, Janina Sajka <janina@rednote.net> wrote:
> 
> It is not news that there are strong opinions concerning both longdesc
> and ARIA-DescribedAt. However, it would be best for us all to carefully
> double-check, and even document our assertions about the positions of
> entities other than our own before representing them categorically in
> public email.

Comments made both publicly and privately have indicated that individuals from the Chrome and Mozilla teams disapprove of the aspect of @aria-describedat that affects mainstream UI. I also added an editorial note to the spec.

EXCERPT from http://www.w3.org/TR/wai-aria-1.1/#aria-describedat

User agents should provide a device-independent mechanism to allow a user to navigate the user agent to content referenced by the @aria-describedat attribute. User agents should also provide a device-independent mechanism to return the user's focus from the descriptive content view to the original content view. For example, a user agent may provide access to the document or document fragment referenced by the @aria-describedat attribute in a contextual menu associated with the object.

Editorial note: JC 2014-06-03. The previous paragraph may be at-risk. Implementors from Mozilla, Google, and Apple have expressed concern over the RFC-2119 "should" requirement above: If the statement remains as-is, @aria-describedat would break the ARIA pattern to not affect mainstream UI. Dominic M. mentioned that if this pattern changed, developers may become more "suspicious of ARIA and not want to apply simple accessibility bug fixes without worrying about the implications for their design." Alex S. said, UI-based requirements "should be rather part of HTML than ARIA."

END EXCERPT.

> Furthermore, it is arguable, and I do assert that the DescribedAt
> addition to ARIA-1.1 did indeed have consensus at the time it was
> introduced. Need I remind everyone that consensus is NOT unanimity
> according to published W3C process? The definition we are called to work
> with is set forth at:
> 
> http://www.w3.org/2005/10/Process-20051014/policies.html#Consensus

By that definition, it was consensus only because my very vocal dissent did not not take the form of a Formal Objection. 

To my knowledge, Formal Objections are only commonly filed against status-track documents once they reach a greater level of maturity than first or second public working draft. It would be burdensome to require working group members to immediately file FOs on every edit they disagreed with. 

I do not know if Alex or Dominic would file a formal objection to @aria-describedat, but I will almost certainly do it if no one else does.

James


> Janina
> 
> 
> Michael(tm) Smith writes:
>> James Craig <jcraig@apple.com>, 2014-07-25 19:21 -0700:
>> 
>>> As the current editor of the ARIA spec, I added @aria-describedat to the
>>> ARIA 1.1 working draft because it gathered majority vote in the working
>>> group, despite my objections and lack of group consensus.
>>> @aria-describedat has all the same problems as @longdesc, but also breaks
>>> an established and generally accepted ARIA pattern of not modifying the
>>> mainstream UI of the host language. Accessibility-conscious user agent
>>> developers from Mozilla and Google raised similar objections to
>>> @aria-describedat.
>> 
>> There's something pretty odd about a decision-making process that results
>> in an intended-for-accessibility feature getting added to a spec over the
>> objections of the spec's own editor and over the objections of
>> accessibility-conscious reps/developers from Apple, Mozilla, and Google.
>> 
>> Some might say it's a sign of that decision-making process being pretty
>> seriously broken and in need of being replaced.
>> 
>>  --Mike
>> 
>> -- 
>> Michael[tm] Smith http://people.w3.org/mike
> 
> 
> 
> -- 
> 
> 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 Monday, 28 July 2014 19:28:39 UTC