Re: Invitation to review WAI-ARIA before Last Call deadline

On Mon, Mar 16, 2009 at 1:44 PM, Charles Chen <clchen@google.com> wrote:

> Here are Google's Last Call comments on W3C ARIA based on our
> implementation experience in having added ARIA support to a number of Web
> 2.0 applications such as Google Reader. Note that in addition, these
> comments also reflect the experience gained from implementing live region
> support in Fire-Vox --- a Google 20% project by Charles Chen that provides a
> freely available Firefox extension that adds self-voicing capabilities to
> the browser.
>
> Specifically, we believe that the last minute changes to the definition of
> live regions --- AKA  changes between last public WD  and Last Call Working
> Draft  lose significant functionality with respect to using W3C  ARIA  for
> highly interactive applications.
>
> We understand that these changes were made at the behest of AT vendors.
> Though we realize that AT implementations are a key part of the end-to-end
> solution, we would also point out that they are but one piece of the
> solution pipeline; further, they also tend to be the component that changes
> the slowest.
>
> In our experience, content follows based on what is supported in mainstream
> browsers; significant availability of content accompanied by browser support
> eventually gains attention from mainstream AT  with respect to gaining
> support.  Finally, the combination of available content, browser support,
> and AT behavior defines accessibility guidelines that get recommended
>  to developers.
>
> Given the length of time it takes to bake a W3C REC, we strongly suggest
> bringing back the  live-region functionality that has been dropped in the
> Last Call WD,  since:
>
>  A) It has been shown to be both implementable, and necessary.
>
>  B) Given time, AT vendors will support it  --- something that is borne out
> by the overall experience re live-regions in ARIA --- as  acase in point, no
> AT  vendor supported any part of live-regions about a year ago.
>
> The live-region functionality that has been dropped in the Last Call WD
> makes it impossible to implement support for certain types of interaction,
> see details below.
>
> To conclude, failure to fix this will leave W3C  ARIA  crippled for many
> years to come , given the pattern we have observed
>  with respect to the evolution of access guidelines.
>
> Live Regions:LC  Version Compared to Last Public WD:
>
>  The current (last Public WD) implementation of live regions gives us:
>
> 1. a priority queue
> 2. a maximum priority which will
> trump everything else (including earlier messages that were also at the
> max)
> 3. a message flushing strategy
>
> The change made in the Last Call WD, namely, removing "rude" from the
> politeness levels and using alert or alertdialog instead, is a bug. A rude
> live region is still a part of the current context, while an alert or an
> alertdialog should be something that comes up which
> takes over the current context; conflating the two would be a mistake.
>
> To see this, note that an alert is not the same thing as a rude live
> region. If you have a region that has some status information, then giving
> it a role of alert will mean that all changes to that region have the
> highest priority possible. But if some status messages should be high
> priority and others not, then you can't get that distinction. With live
> region settings, you can just change the
> politeness level dynamically and have it work.
>
>  Based on implementation experience of channels in Fire Vox, the main
> contribution that channels provides is a way to specify whether or not
> something that is higher priority should flush previous messages.
>
>  These simplifications will break existing implementations that use live
> regions. If we are going to break things this late in the game, we should
> make sure that we are doing the right thing and that we don't lose the
> functionality that currently exists. So a suggested fix:
>
>  1. Keep polite, assertive, and rude and allow numbers. Much like CSS
> allows for small, medium, and large values, polite would be the minimum,
> assertive would be in the middle, and rude would be the maximum.
>
>  2. Drop channels and add an attribute to specify whether or not the
> current message should flush previous messages. This attribute should have a
> sensible default value of true to prevent too much chattering.
>
> -Charles and Raman
>
>
> On Mon, Mar 9, 2009 at 10:27 AM, T.V Raman <raman@google.com> wrote:
>
>> Yes, we'll send you Last Call comments based on our  collective
>> experience in building ARIA-support library Google-AxsJAX
>> http://google-axsjax.googlecode.com,
>> our experience in integrating ARIA  support into sophisticated
>> Web-2.0 applications, as well as
>> Charles' expertize from building Fire-Vox. Stay tuned, and thanks
>> again for asking.
>>
>> James Craig writes:
>>  > Charles and TV,
>>  >
>>  > As representatives for a company with several web apps and a browser
>>  > that implements a portion of the WAI-ARIA draft, we consider your
>>  > feedback invaluable, so the editors of the WAI-ARIA drafts would like
>>  > to invite you to review the latest working draft before the new last
>>  > call date of April 17th. Due to the length of the document and
>>  > proximity to the SXSW and CSUN conferences, the review date has been
>>  > extended.
>>  >
>>  > Please send all specification comments to <mailto:
>> public-pfwg-comments@w3.org
>>  >  > before 17 April 2009.
>>  >
>>  >      WAI-ARIA Specification, Last Call Working Draft
>>  >      http://www.w3.org/TR/wai-aria/
>>  >
>>  > If you have time to review the other WAI-ARIA documents, we'd
>>  > appreciate any feedback you can provide.
>>  >
>>  >      WAI-ARIA User Agent Implementation Guide, First Public Working
>> Draft
>>  >      http://www.w3.org/TR/wai-aria-implementation/
>>  >
>>  >      WAI-ARIA Best Practices Guide, Working Draft
>>  >      http://www.w3.org/TR/wai-aria-practices/
>>  >
>>  > Thanks.
>>  > James Craig
>>  > Member, PFWG, W3C
>>
>> --
>> Best Regards,
>> --raman
>>
>> Title:  Research Scientist
>> Email:  raman@google.com
>> WWW:    http://emacspeak.sf.net/raman/
>> Google: tv+raman
>> GTalk:  raman@google.com, tv.raman.tv@gmail.com
>> PGP:    http://emacspeak.sf.net/raman/raman-almaden.asc
>>
>>
>