Use of BSTR in MSAA VARIANT

Looking for folks’ opinions on how we relate, in the HTML to accessibility API mappings, Firefox and Chrome’s use of VARIANT to return the tag name as string (BSTR) for elements without established roles in MSAA.

I think we had decided at one point that since this approach isn’t “described by the MSAA specification”, we wouldn’t indicate or promote it as a preferred mapping in the actual mapping tables, but instead just include a note about it [1]. The note exists [2], but we still have this use of BSTR noted in the MSAA + IA2 mappings themselves, for example, see the mapping for abbr [3].

Am I right in thinking, one, that Mozilla is looking at dropping the “BSTR hack” [4], and two, that the individual element mappings for MSAA + IA2 shouldn’t include this use of BSTR?

Cheers,

Jason

[1] https://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=16769#c3
[2] http://rawgithub.com/w3c/html-api-map/master/index.html#use-of-msaa-variant-by-some-user-agents
[3] http://rawgithub.com/w3c/html-api-map/master/index.html#el-abbr
[4] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=798492

Jason Kiss
jason@accessibleculture.org
http://www.accessibleculture.org

Received on Sunday, 2 March 2014 21:19:14 UTC