Re: False aria-describedby expectations in ARIA Authoring Practices (longdesc)

hi jonas,

> Like I said, this was a patch to the code that exposes content to AT
> users.

how does it do so?

what mecahnism does it use to provide access /point to  to structured
content only for AT users.


But having read further i do think you are correct in your interpretation

from the aria implementaion guide:

"Note that aria-describedby may reference structured or interactive
information where users would want to be able to navigate to different
sections of content. User agents MAY provide a way for the user to
navigate to structured information referenced by aria-describedby and
assistive technology SHOULD provide such a method."
http://www.w3.org/TR/wai-aria-implementation/#mapping_additional_relations

still the problem being that there is no requirment on either browsers
or AT to do so and as implemented none do it.

So in regards to the leifs original issue with the authoring guide, I
still think he is correct and that until such times that
aria-describedby is implemented in a way that matches the authoring
advice it is misleading and inaccurate.


regards
stevef

On 22 April 2011 23:08, Jonas Sicking <jonas@sicking.cc> wrote:
> On Fri, Apr 22, 2011 at 2:25 PM, Steve Faulkner
> <faulkner.steve@gmail.com> wrote:
>> Hi Jonas
>>
>>> I wrote a patch in about 30 minutes to do so.
>>
>> Interesting, so how is this behaviour exposed to users?
>>
>> Feedback received from the NVDA developers was that they want UI in the browser.
>
> Like I said, this was a patch to the code that exposes content to AT
> users. It would be equally trivial to add a context menu item for all
> users (similar to what I believe opera does for their @longdesc
> implementation). In fact, we could even display a context menu item
> for each link if there are multiple as aria-describedby allows
> pointing to multiple elements, many of which could be links.
>
>> How does it affect current expected behaviour for describedby?
>
> I'm not sure what you mean by "expected"? (I seem to have different
> expectations of how aria-describedby should be exposed to users than
> many others on this list).
>
> But the patch does not affect how we expose describedby otherwise.
> Given that I don't know our accessibility almost at all, I don't know
> off the top of my head know the code that exposes aria-describedby to
> users. However given that it's software, anything is possible :). But
> I'd have to work on it a bit longer than 30 minutes to get something
> working.
>
> I'm willing to do such work, but this working group also has to be
> willing to stop thinking outside the box of "what browsers/AT vendors
> do today".
>
> / Jonas
>



-- 
with regards

Steve Faulkner
Technical Director - TPG

www.paciellogroup.com | www.HTML5accessibility.com |
www.twitter.com/stevefaulkner
HTML5: Techniques for providing useful text alternatives -
dev.w3.org/html5/alt-techniques/
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Received on Saturday, 23 April 2011 06:41:07 UTC