[Bug 26418] New: Default ARIA roles for tables

https://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=26418

            Bug ID: 26418
           Summary: Default ARIA roles for tables
           Product: HTML WG
           Version: unspecified
          Hardware: PC
                OS: All
            Status: NEW
          Severity: normal
          Priority: P3
         Component: HTML5 spec
          Assignee: dave.null@w3.org
          Reporter: craig@craigfrancis.co.uk
        QA Contact: public-html-bugzilla@w3.org
                CC: mike@w3.org, public-html-admin@w3.org,
                    public-html-wg-issue-tracking@w3.org

The HTML5 validator requires ARIA @role attributes when specifying @aria-sort
on a table... the roles being "grid", "row", "columnheader", "rowheader" and
"gridcell"... which seem to be redundant information.

The issue seems to be that the "default implicit ARIA semantics" does not set
these roles for tables:

http://www.w3.org/html/wg/drafts/html/master/dom.html#sec-implicit-aria-semantics

I believe this decision may be due to tables being used for layout.

However as websites should now be using CSS, and considering that anyone who
isn't probably has bigger accessibility issues (where role="presentation" is
still available to them), I would personally like to avoid the relatively
redundant attributes... e.g.

<table role="grid"> to <table>
<tr role="row"> to <tr>
<th scope="col" role="columnheader" aria-sort="ascending"> to <th scope="col"
aria-sort="ascending">

In the same way that the following should be possible, and seems to be what
most developers use:

<footer role="contentinfo"> to <footer>.

See the two example tables at:

http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-validator/2014Jul/0013.html

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Received on Wednesday, 23 July 2014 14:57:06 UTC