WAI-ARIA: Text Equivalent Computation

This algorithm (section 4.2.7.3) has many issues:

  1. "hidden" is not defined. In the DOM nothing is hidden. I'm assuming  
you might mean not visible on screen, but that is a very hard concept to  
define and implement. This needs to  be far more concrete to be  
implemented.
  2. The use of DOM attributes is inconsistent with HTML5. Simply using  
attributes would suffice here I think and be more clear.
  3. The third bullet point of 2A is not clear at all and saying it is  
covered by the "appropriate specification for that markup" is not true.  
HTML4 or HTML5 does not cover what seem to be hinting at here.
  4. "Additional contribution of user-entered data" needs a much more  
precise definition as well. "appended after" is also not particularly  
clear here.
  5. 2C leads to infinite recursion in this scenario:

   <span id="a">
    <span aria-describedby="b">X</span>
   </span>

   <span id="b">
    <span aria-describedby="a">X</span>
   </span>

     and something points to either #a or #b if I'm reading this correctly.
  6. 2D is also not very clear. What to do for SVG where tooltips can  
contain markup?
  7. Point 3 is even less clear. List style bullets are not generated text.  
Whitespace normalization needs to be defined here.

In general this algorithm seems very much over engineered for something  
that should be very simple. Getting this interoperably implemented is a  
gigantic task for very little benefit so it is unlikely it will ever  
happen. Also, I thought this draft was not about implementation  
requirements?


-- 
Anne van Kesteren
http://annevankesteren.nl/

Received on Thursday, 2 April 2009 11:26:26 UTC