Re: aria vs native alternatives [was: Re: feedback requested on WAI CG Consensus Resolutions on Text alternatives in HTML 5 document]

This is not a contradiction in ARIA principles. Today assistive
technologies are benefiting by being able to produce landmark navigation
interfaces like this.

What you are suggesting is that browser should not take advantage of curb
cuts. We don't mandate that they provide this type of navigation support
but frankly we believe this is a usability curb cut they can take advantage
of.

I can't imagine you would want the city maintenance people to start filling
in the curb cuts and force you to slam your roller bag into them. :-)

I would love a command on my IPhone to bring the navigation sections into
view instead of thumbing my way through the UI.

Product developers benefit from landmarks much the same way they will
benefit from the nav element in HTML 5. They can dump the skip to main
content link which messes with the layout of their UI. Now an advantage of
ARIA is that if you wanted to bring up the navigational land marks or HTML
5 landmark tags in a navigational tree view you can declaratively label
each with a heading that can be displayed next to it.

Rich

Rich Schwerdtfeger
Distinguished Engineer, SWG Accessibility Architect/Strategist


                                                                           
             Henri Sivonen                                                 
             <hsivonen@iki.fi>                                             
             Sent by:                                                   To 
             wai-xtech-request         Steven Faulkner                     
             @w3.org                   <faulkner.steve@gmail.com>          
                                                                        cc 
                                       Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis               
             09/03/2009 03:41          <bhawkeslewis@googlemail.com>,      
             AM                        HTMLWG WG <public-html@w3.org>, W3C 
                                       WAI-XTECH <wai-xtech@w3.org>        
                                                                   Subject 
                                       Re: aria vs native alternatives     
                                       [was: Re: feedback requested on WAI 
                                         CG Consensus Resolutions on Text  
                                       alternatives in HTML 5 document]    
                                                                           
                                                                           
                                                                           
                                                                           
                                                                           
                                                                           




On Sep 3, 2009, at 00:02, Steven Faulkner wrote:

> "There are also mainstream benefits of providing navigation
> landmarks. Your browser may assign key sequences to move focus to
> these sections as they can be set on every site. Navigation to these
> landmarks is device independent. A personal digital assistant (PDA)
> could assign a device key to get to them in your document."
> http://www.w3.org/WAI/PF/aria-practices/#kbd_layout


This seems to contradict the stated principles of ARIA. I think either
aria-practices or ARIA 1.0 needs to change to remove the contradiction.

--
Henri Sivonen
hsivonen@iki.fi
http://hsivonen.iki.fi/