WAI-ARIA comments from EOWG

Dear PFWG,

EOWG recently discussed the WAI-ARIA documents and have the following comments. (These comments were generated by a subset of the EOWG and may not reflect consensus throughout the group.)

1.  All of the documents

* Make clear up front:
- what is in that specific document and who it is for
- that there are related documents designed for other audiences, &/or that are companions or dependencies of that doc
- they should first have read the introduction to WAI-ARIA and the related documents at http://www.w3.org/WAI/intro/aria

* For consistency with other WAI specs, consider the following titles/h1s:
- Accessible Rich Internet Applications (WAI-ARIA) 1.0 [without ‘Version’]
- WAI-ARIA Primer for Accessible Rich Internet Applications 1.0
- WAI-ARIA Best Practices for Accessible Rich Internet Applications 1.0
- WAI-ARIA User Agent Implementation Guide for Accessible Rich Internet Applications 1.0
- WAI-ARIA Roadmap for Accessible Rich Internet Applications 1.0 [or no 1.0 needed?]

* For documents that are informative (rather than normative standards/specs), make that clear.

* <a>ARIA Overview</a> should be <a>WAI-ARIA Overview</a>

* Explain jargon like "user agent" on first use. Link terms to their definitions in the glossary. Make sure acronyms are written out in first use.

* Consider using the CSS as is in /TR/WCAG/, especially for the links to the definitions

* add [contents] link at the top, e.g., like /TR/WCAG/

* include link to public comments list in the Status section (or wherever else appropriate)

2. WAI-ARIA 1.0 Editor's Draft <http://www.w3.org/WAI/PF/aria/>

* In "This section is informative" link "informative" to definition and un-italicize.

* Change "Semantics are knowledge of" to "Semantics is the knowledge of..."

3. WAI-ARIA Best Practices <http://www.w3.org/WAI/PF/aria-practices/ />

"Writing rich internet applications is much more difficult than righting in HTML. It is even more work to ensure your application runs in multiple browsers and support WAI-ARIA."
is pretty strong. Please reconsider wording. This could be taken out of context and used to say that the main point is that ARIA is really hard, instead of how awesome it is to the user.

Note that some EOWG participants were somewhat uncomfortable telling people so strongly to use toolkits. (more on this is in a separate email)

(also typo "righting" and “support”)

###

Regards,
~Shawn for EOWG <http://www.w3.org/WAI/EO/>


------------------
Shawn Lawton Henry
W3C Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI)
e-mail: shawn@w3.org
phone: +1.617.395.7664
about: http://www.w3.org/People/Shawn/

Received on Thursday, 12 February 2009 22:40:38 UTC