Revised response to your comments on Accessible Rich Internet Applications (WAI-ARIA) 1.0

Dear Sofia Celic-Li:

Thank you for acknowledging our response to your comments on the 15
December 2009 Working Draft of Accessible Rich Internet Applications
(WAI-ARIA) 1.0 (http://www.w3.org/TR/2009/WD-wai-aria-20091215/). Because
your acknowledgement indicated you were not satisfied with our action and /
or provided additional useful information, we reopened the comments to see
if there was further work that could be done related to that comment. We
enclose an updated response to your comments. We recognize that you still
may not accept our disposition. If we do disagree, your comments will be
reviewed during the transition meeting with the Director when we seek to
advance the document to the next stage of maturity.

Please review our updated resolutions for the following comments, and
reply to us by 18 August 2010 to say whether you now accept them. If we do
not hear from you by that date, we will mark your comment as "no response"
and close it. If you need more time to consider your acknowledgement,
please let us know. Although you acknowledged our response before, because
of the updated response we need a new acknowledgement from you to record
whether you now agree or disagree with our updated response. Note that only
comments that we reopened are included below; any other comments which you
previously acknowledged are still recorded as you last saw them. You can
respond in the following ways:

* If you have a W3C account, we request that you respond online at
http://www.w3.org/WAI/PF/comments/acknowledge?document_version_id=6;

* Else, by email to public-pfwg-comments@w3.org (be sure to reference our
comment ID so we can track your response). Note that this list is publicly
archived.

Please see below for the text of comments that you submitted and our
updated resolutions to your comments. Each comment includes a link to the
archived copy of your original comment on
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-pfwg-comments/, and may also
include links to the relevant changes in the Accessible Rich Internet
Applications (WAI-ARIA) 1.0 editors' draft at
http://www.w3.org/WAI/PF/aria//.

Note that if you still strongly disagree with our resolution on an issue,
you have the opportunity to file a formal objection (according to 3.3.2 of
the W3C Process, at
http://www.w3.org/2005/10/Process-20051014/policies.html#WGArchiveMinorityViews)
to public-pfwg-comments@w3.org. Formal objections will be reviewed during
the candidate recommendation transition meeting with the W3C Director,
unless we can come to agreement with you on a resolution in advance of the
meeting.

Thank you for your time reviewing and sending comments. Though we cannot
always do exactly what each commenter requests, all of the comments are
valuable to the development of Accessible Rich Internet Applications
(WAI-ARIA) 1.0.

Regards,

Janina Sajka, PFWG Chair
Michael Cooper, PFWG Staff Contact


Comment 328: live region option for announcing an update has occurred but not the change
Date: 2010-06-22
Archived at: http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-pfwg-comments/2010AprJun/0006.html
Relates to: Accessible Rich Internet Applications (WAI-ARIA) 1.0 - aria-atomic (property) <http://www.w3.org/TR/2009/WD-wai-aria-20091215/#aria-atomic>
Status: Proposal not accepted

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Your comment:
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I have an early recollection of an ARIA feature that does not seem to be
part of the specification now. I may have had this wrong from the start but
it is a feature that I would find very useful and I am not able to find
anything in the current specification to address it.

I would like to have a screen reader user notified that a particular live
region has been updated but not announce the change itself. 

To use an example implementation: I have a search page that includes a
search form at the top of the main content area and the search results
(table format) below the search form. As the user types characters into the
search edit field the search result table is updated. I would like to let
the user know that the search results have been updated but I do not think
that announcing the content of the search table is appropriate for each
character the user types.

This will allow the user to investigate the change at a time of their
choosing.

I have not been able to find an appropriate combination of ARIA properties
that would result in a screen reader announcing "Search results updated"
(with "Search Results" being the label for the live region) only.

--------------------------------
Response from the Working Group:
--------------------------------
== Response to the concerns raised in your acknowledgement ==

An example of where a screen reader could decide not to read the entire
contents of a live region might be when it is controlled by a search
landmark region. You would not want to automatically read the entire live
region when it changes when it is controlled by a search landmark region.
Also, the size of an live region could be measured by an AT and the AT
could simply announce that the region has changed. That said, you have
convinced us that we must look into this further in ARIA 2.0 and we have
added this item to the list of points to address in ISSUE-161 live region
support for ARIA 2.0. http://www.w3.org/WAI/PF/Group/track/issues/161

== Original Response ==

This is a common use case for Ajax applications. The correct solution is
to mark a relationship between the search landmark and the search results
by a controls relationship. This allows the assistive technology to
indicate to the user that any action on a search will result in a change to
another part of the page. The user can then simply follow the relationship
with their assistive technology. The ability to identify and follow the
controls relationship is just now being implemented in screen readers.
Beyond this the author should not be specifying to the assistive technology
how the live region is to be rendered and when. The author should only
provide guidance and this would be done by marking the live region as being
"polite." The assistive technology should assess, based on what is
controlling it whether to speak a polite area or notify the user that the
area has changed.

Instead of providing the full search result as polite region, it's
sometimes more appropriate to only announce meta information of the search
results. This has to be provided by the author. This can be done by live
region messages, e.g. log. Use cases can be the amount of search results or
search suggestions available while typing. The amount of changes probably
are too much to consume and a reasonable meta information provided by the
author can be better. Example can be search suggestions while typing.

Received on Wednesday, 4 August 2010 19:48:15 UTC