Re: Last Call comments on WAI-ARIA 1.0

L. David Baron writes:

> Having semantic markup for these things that is not specific to
> assistive technology will lead to benefits for users, including
> accessibility benefits.  For example, in Firefox, users who have
> configured a Windows high contrast theme get by default the Firefox
> preference to ignore colors specified by the author.  This
> preference causes problems with some types of markup where authors
> construct their own controls -- the same types of markup that ARIA
> is trying to make more accessible.  For example, with this
> preference set, users are unable to see the selection in a tree
> control, since that selection is expressed as an author-specified
> color.  The ARIA annotations don't help here, but if the tree
> control were marked up as an HTML5 tree control, there would be an
> appropriate default color for the selected row.

I strongly agree this is a significant problem with the sort of DOM ARIA 
is trying to make more accessible that is largely unsolved by ARIA 
itself. It is hard to see how many of the examples in the draft could be 
seen as conforming to WCAG 2.0 in principle or in detail.

I think the ARIA spec could do some things to mitigate the problem.

Either:

A. Demonstrate how one could reject all publisher styles and style an 
ARIA-annotated DOM. This demonstration would take the form of an 
informative guide, including CSS where possible. Compare:

http://dev.w3.org/html5/spec/Overview.html#rendering

This is not as ideal as a world in which publisher styles and user 
styles can be mixed. It may be someone can come up with a clever way to 
deliver that world too on top of ARIA, but the loss of publisher styles 
entire would (I think) be an acceptable fallback position for ensuring 
accessibility of content and functionality.

Or:

A1. Warn authors of this problem.

A2. Ensure all examples in the spec are be perceivable and operable when 
rendered without CSS by providing explicit content. For example, "img" 
elements with "alt" text could replace implied CSS background images.

It may be that the first approach is suitable for some ARIA features, 
and the second approach for other ARIA features. It is unlikely both 
approaches are suitable for a given feature, since user agent/user 
styles would probably conflict with explicit content.

--
Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis

Received on Tuesday, 14 April 2009 11:21:43 UTC