Re: Comment on WAI-ARIA Role: Needs "hint" Role

Rich Schwerdtfeger
Distinguished Engineer, SWG Accessibility Architect/Strategist
blog: http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/blogs/page/schwer

Doug Schepers <schepers@w3.org> wrote on 09/04/2008 03:49:16 PM:

> Hi, Rich-
>
> Richard Schwerdtfeger wrote (on 9/3/08 7:59 AM):
> >
> > A tooltip is defined as it should be.
>
> I'm not asking you to change "tooltip"... I just noted that there are
> different possible definitions for the term:
>
> a) a presentation mode, popping up a little textbox that can contain any
> arbitrary content with no specific semantic category;
>
> b) a semantic category for giving instructions to the user (i.e., a "tip
> on using a tool"), regardless of presentation mode.
>
> What the SVG WG needs is the latter.  What ARIA defines is the former.
>
>
> > Information on how to interact with an object would use the
> description role.
>
> No, that's a misuse of the "description" role.  A "description" should
> be suitable as a textual replacement for the image, in case the image in
> not available or perceivable.
>

That is not how we designed it. Description is designed to replace
longdesc, provide additional help information, and
link to prose on the page if necessary.

> As an example, there might be a graphic of a little horse in an SVG
> game, where the goal is to jump the horse over hay bales.  There are
> three bits of info the author could provide:
> * a title for the element ("A horse")
> * a description of the element ("A brown horse with a rider on his back")
> * a hint for interacting with the element ("Make the horse jump by
> clicking on him or hitting the space bar.")
>
I see. The problem with that is the platform accessibility API have no
single hint. Looks like you modeled hint
after XForms or perhaps the other way around. The one problem I see is that
with script you could
potentially have multiple actions and consequently multiple "hints" - one
corresponding to each action. Have you
thought about this for SVG or do you always expect there to be one action?

We do have, in some accessibility api, is an action description which in
effect would be your "hint."
So, for SVG there should not be an overlap. We relegate desrcliption to "A
brown horse, blah blah."
ARIA, consequently has no equivalent for hint so for SVG the mapping should
be to the corresponding action. This
is typically short though.

Make sense?

We can clarify this in our spec that description should not be used to
describe an action.

> Each of these is a discrete category for metadata for the element, and
> any or all of them may be displayed by a number of means, including as a
> tooltip popup on hover or focus (or verbally, or in the status bar, or
> superimposed inline over the element, or what have you).
>
> We want to give the user the finest useful degree of control over what
> information they want to access.  To do that, we want to avoid
> conflating "description" and "instruction" (or "hint").
>
> I hope that clarifies my request.  Is there a problem with adding a new
> role for this purpose?
>
>
> > In HTML there should be a relation to reference it.
>
> I'm not sure how this impacts SVG.
>
> Regards-
> -Doug Schepers
> W3C Team Contact, WebApps, SVG, and CDF
>
>