Re: Deprecation of DOMAttrModified (Was: DOMActivate vs. Activation Behavior)

On Feb 9, 2010, at 1:43 PM, Jonas Sicking wrote:

> It does however strike me as scary that AT is modifying web pages and
> expecting web pages to react to these modifications. I would imagine
> most authors will not be aware that they need to do this, and that
> it's unlikely that they'll do that incorrectly even if they are aware.

As far as I know, no AT does this yet, and I agree, most authors would not expect it. This approach is currently deferred as an ARIA 2.0 issue.

> However I know nothing about why this behavior exists so I'd say it's
> almost certain things work differently than what I'm imagining.

It's for device and platform independence. I mentioned the touch screen example; another reason is that, with the ARIA 1.0 release, keyboard control of web apps is left up to the author to manage with a de facto set of keyboard commands. It'd be inappropriate for a W3C spec to define user interface like these keyboard commands, so they're currently in a non-normative document. The shortcuts used are also somewhat Windows-centric, in my opinion.

The more robust future solution would be to have an AT user interact with a web application in the same manner they'd interact with a native OS application, including all the same keyboard shortcuts. That ideal won't be implemented for quite some time, hence its deferral to ARIA 2.0, but DOMAttrModified, or a suitable replacement, is one of the puzzle pieces we'll eventually need.

Received on Tuesday, 9 February 2010 22:38:33 UTC