Re: ISSUE-636 ACTION-1398 Provide spec. text for aria-roledescription

On 04/02/2014 02:25 PM, James Craig wrote:
> On Apr 2, 2014, at 4:01 AM, Joanmarie Diggs <jdiggs@igalia.com> wrote:

>> BUT that still leaves at least one noticeable/unmappable area: What
>> happens when there is no non-generic tag AND there is no ARIA role; just
>> the localized description? Consider this modification of your original
>> video example:
>>
>>    <div role="group" aria-roledescription="video">
>>
>> ATK still wants that mapped as ATK_ROLE_VIDEO, but there's no
>> programmatic way for the user agents to get there from here. Ideas?
> 
> ATK should map this as ATK_ROLE_GROUP, not ATK_ROLE_VIDEO. 
> 
> No platform role mapping should change based on a localized role description string. That will need to be a normative requirement in the spec. User Agents MUST NOT modify the role mapping based on the localized @aria-roledescription.

I agree 100% that what you say should be what the spec and UAIG say. I
wasn't suggesting otherwise. In fact, it was this very assumption that
caused me to raise the above example as an issue. :)

The web developer presumably did something like the above because he/she
has a video player with a much better design and user interaction than
can be accomplished natively. But the thing is still a video, and the
web dev knows that, and I would really like to know it for the reasons
I've been stating:

1. We have the video role type in ATK
2. That role type can be used by screen readers to provide document
   summary information (page has three videos)
3. That role type can be used by screen readers to provide quick key
   navigation (i.e. to jump immediately amongst each video)
4. Knowing the real role makes it possible to respect users' braille
   verbosity settings
5. That role type is localized into a ton of languages so we can speak
   the right role no matter what

If user agents expose <video role="group"> as a video -- just for ATK,
then the problem is solved when the HTML element is used by the web
developer. But in the case above, there is no way for an ATK/AT-SPI2
screen reader to accomplish anything but item 5 -- and it can only do
that for the locales provided by the web developer.

(Related aside: Did we reach a final conclusion on how we can identify
the locale of the localized role description so that we don't try to
speak Spanish to the Hungarian user?)

Having slept on this a bit, and considering that you stated elsewhere in
this thread that you anticipated some things (e.g. video) would
ultimately turn into official ARIA roles, could we consider the
tokenized approach? For instance:

    <div role="video group" aria-roledescription="video">

User agents could fall back to group for the mapping for everyone but
ATK. And when "video" becomes a real ARIA role, the above would not need
to be changed by web developers. The other platforms still get their
localized description, and ATK can accomplish that same functionality
through its accessibility API.

Thoughts?
--joanie

Received on Thursday, 3 April 2014 18:46:45 UTC