RE: Response to your comments on WAI-ARIA 1.0 Authoring Practices

Re. Comment 322: Popups

Thank you for adding section "4.4.Popups and drop-downs" to the WAI-ARIA Authoring Practices. This is helpful. I still feel that aria-haspopup is potentially confusing. I concur that it is clear from the first line of the aria-haspopup definition that this property only applies to "popup context menu or sub-level menu[s]". My problem with this is that the term "popup" is applied more loosely in general use (e.g., referring to dialog boxes, modal windows, and pop-up ads, in addition to menus). So, semantically I would expect it to apply to these other non-menu contexts as well, and I suspect some developers will operate with similar assumptions. You can always point them to the definition in the spec, but ideally the markup will be intuitive enough that developers will use it correctly even if they don't read the spec as thoroughly as perhaps they should. 

Have you considered alternative names for this property that might be more accurate, such as aria-haspopupmenu?  


-----Original Message-----
From: Janina Sajka [mailto:janina@a11y.org] 
Sent: Thursday, June 17, 2010 11:30 AM
To: Terrill Thompson
Cc: PFWG Public Comments
Subject: Response to your comments on WAI-ARIA 1.0 Authoring Practices

Comment 322: Popups
Date: 2010-03-23
Archived at: http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-pfwg-comments/2010JanMar/0045.html
Relates to: WAI-ARIA 1.0 Authoring Practices - 4.4. Popups and drop-downs <http://www.w3.org/TR/2009/WD-wai-aria-practices-20091215/#relations_haspopup>
Status: Answered question

-------------
Your comment:
-------------
I've been struggling recently with how best to apply ARIA to the use case
of a hidden informational popup that is made visible by user action.
Netflix..com provides a good example of this type of behavior (hovering
over a movie results in a popup being displayed), as does my own test
page:
http://terrillthompson.com/ncaa/test.html

When a user triggers the pop-up, the desired effect is for screen readers
to automatically alert the user that the popup has appeared, and
temporarily move their focus to that popup. When they close the popup,
their focus should return to the originating trigger element. 

--------------------------------
Response from the Working Group:
--------------------------------
We have added an example of the usage of @aria-haspup to section "4.4.
Popups and drop-downs" of the WAI-ARIA Authoring Practices [1].  The
example is of a menubar, its menus, and a submenu.  The @aria-haspopup
property is used in the example only where a menu would be invoked, as
according to the ARIA specification [2].

The Netflix popup is an example of bubble help, and not of a menu.  The
@aria-haspopup property does not apply.  The closest ARIA role for this
popup is "tooltip" [3].

The intent of your show/hide text example is unclear, making it difficult
to advise what role to use here.  But, it is clear that the toggled text is
not a menu.  Because of that, the element that triggers showing the text
would not have an @aria-haspopup property.

[1]
http://www.w3.org/TR/2009/WD-wai-aria-practices-20091215/#relations_haspopup
[2]
http://www.w3.org/TR/2009/WD-wai-aria-20091215/states_and_properties#aria-haspopup
[3] http://www.w3.org/TR/2009/WD-wai-aria-20091215/roles#tooltip

Received on Friday, 23 July 2010 18:12:31 UTC