RE: Extensible ARIA?

One thing we've talked about for ARIA 2.0 is the idea of adding something similar to the Control Patterns in UIA.  Control patterns describe behaviors, like invoke, select, droptarget, etc.  They include properties, methods and events.  They can be combined to describe the behavior of UI controls that don't fit neatly into a role.  These would then be given a name in the Localized Control Type field, as discussed in an earlier thread.

In UIA, a role is called a control type, and every control type has required control patterns.  For example, buttons must support invoke.  Some control types also have optional control patterns.

This model allows for a large number of combinations, and custom naming.  It's pretty powerful.

There are also mechanisms for custom properties, events and patterns.  That might be more than we want to bite off in ARIA 2.0.

You can read more about patterns here:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/ee671194(v=vs.85).aspx

More about UIA in general here:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/ee684076(v=vs.85).aspx

UIA has also part of ISO/IEC TR 13066-2:2012 available at:
http://www.iso.org/iso/iso_catalogue/catalogue_tc/catalogue_detail.htm?csnumber=53996

From: Léonie Watson [mailto:lwatson@paciellogroup.com]
Sent: Wednesday, April 2, 2014 1:16 AM
To: 'W3C WAI Protocols & Formats'
Subject: Extensible ARIA?

Hello,

Web components offer exciting possibilities, and accessibility is going to need to keep pace with this potential. This came up at EdgeConf recently, where ARIA was widely thought to be the solution amongst developers.

I'm not sure that ARIA (as it stands) can keep pace with the near infinite range of components that developers could/will create? It seems improbable that the ARIA spec could ever encompass every/any element/role that a developer might conjure up.

Jeremy Keith made this point at EdgeConf, and also suggested the possibility of ARIA becoming extensible [1].

I thought it was worth raising here for discussion. Apologies if it's already being discussed here or elsewhere.

Léonie.
[1] http://adactio.com/journal/6719/



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Senior Accessibility Engineer, TPG
@LeonieWatson @PacielloGroup