- From: Jonas Sicking <jonas@sicking.cc>
- Date: Wed, 8 Feb 2012 18:47:56 -0800
- To: Charles Pritchard <chuck@jumis.com>
- Cc: Maciej Stachowiak <mjs@apple.com>, Steve Faulkner <faulkner.steve@gmail.com>, Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis <bhawkeslewis@googlemail.com>, John Foliot <john@foliot.ca>, Matthew Turvey <mcturvey@gmail.com>, Leif Halvard Silli <xn--mlform-iua@xn--mlform-iua.no>, Silvia Pfeiffer <silviapfeiffer1@gmail.com>, Laura Carlson <laura.lee.carlson@gmail.com>, Sam Ruby <rubys@intertwingly.net>, Paul Cotton <Paul.Cotton@microsoft.com>, HTML WG <public-html@w3.org>
On Tue, Feb 7, 2012 at 12:40 PM, Charles Pritchard <chuck@jumis.com> wrote: >> I don't think Apple has a strong stance either way on using >> @aria-describedby to point to @hidden elements, but I believe we could >> reasonably expose full semantics of hidden content pointed to by >> aria-describedby, this is more or less the same as the work we'd have to do >> to expose <canvas> children as an accessible tree. > > > <canvas><button /></canvas> is not the same as <canvas><button hidden > /></canvas>. > > Elements within the canvas subtree are not hidden, though. It's apples to > oranges, though both fruits. > "The hidden attribute is a boolean attribute. When specified on an element, > it indicates that the element is not yet, or is no longer, relevant. The > hidden attribute must not be used to hide content that could legitimately be > shown in another presentation." > http://www.w3.org/TR/html5/editing.html#the-hidden-attribute The semantic meaning of the contents of a canvas is obviously different from the semantic meaning of the contents of a hidden element. However implementation-wise, the reason that they are special when exposed to AT is exactly the same. In firefox, the reason that @hidden elements are "stringified" when exposed through aria-describedby is because they don't have CSS boxes. This is also why we have problems currently when exposing the contents of a <canvas>. In both cases the accessibility code "fails" because it tries to use the CSS boxes which aren't there. Hence the fallback to stringify. It sounds like Apple has solved this in their AT code for <canvas> such that it can work despite a lack of CSS boxes. I believe Maciej is saying they can probably use the same solution to expose the full semantics of @hidden elements pointed to be aria-describedby. Exposing the rich semantics of contents inside a <canvas> in Firefox will take a lot more than changing what object <canvas> inherits from. Whatever solution we come up with for that can hopefully be reused to expose the rich contents of @hidden elements exposed through aria-describedby. We now have two implementations which say that exposing the rich contents of @hidden elements pointed to using aria-describedby is implementable. And is implementable without changes from AT vendors. If people still want to mark such pages invalid, or even specify that browsers should ignore such descriptions, please do so because you think that it's good for accessibility. Not because you think it can't or won't be implemented. / Jonas
Received on Thursday, 9 February 2012 02:48:57 UTC