ACTION-1440: landmarks section uses "region of page" in prose even though "region" is not a landmark

After today's lengthy discussion of action 1440, I gave the issues raised 
during the call a fresh look. A difficulty facing several of the proposed 
solutions, which was pointed out several times by James Craig, is that in 
addition to landmark, other subclasses of region include alert, article, 
grid, list, log, status, and tabpanel. I propose that this is actually the 
root of the problem. This is what prevents us from clarifying requirements 
associated with the region role.

Please consider the following.

First, the description of region, which was not being fundamentally 
disputed is:
"A large perceivable section of a web page or document, that is important 
enough to be included in a page summary or table of contents, for example, 
an area of the page containing live sporting event statistics."

Now, ask yourself, is a list, grid, tabpanel, alert, or status element 
necessarily a large perceivable section of a web page or document, that is 
important enough to be included in a page summary or table of contents?

I believe the answer is clearly "no!"

I propose the following changes for ARIA 1.1 to resolve the issues 
surrounding action 1440.

1. Change the super class of the following roles to be the abstract role 
section: alert, grid, list, log, status, and tabpanel.

2. Remove region as a superclass of article, leaving article with document 
as its only superclass.

3. Change the "Name from" characteristic of abstract role section to be 
"N/A".

4. Change the definition of landmark as follows.
Current definition:
A type of region on a page to which the user may want quick access. 
Content in such a region is different from that of other regions on the 
page and relevant to a specific user purpose, such as navigating, 
searching, perusing the primary content, etc.
Proposed new definition:
A region of a page to which the user may want quick access. The region has 
either a type (role) or label or both that conveys its relevantce to a 
specific purpose, such as navigating, searching, perusing the primary 
content, etc.

5. Keep the current landmark role as abstract. Even though we had general 
agreement that making it concrete may be a good idea, after reconsidering, 
I think it will create significant problems. Primary reasons:
A. a generic landmark role that does not require a label will reduce 
usability given that the landmark will have neither a clear purpose nor a 
label. We agreed that if landmark were concrete, it could not require 
label in order to be exposed as a landmark.
B. Making landmark concrete does not benefit current UA and AT 
implementations that support authors use of labeled regions as generic 
landmark containers and could create confusion since a labeled region and 
an unlabeled generic landmark would need to receive equal treatment by UA 
and AT.
C. Given the above proposed definition of landmark and changes to the 
ontology, we could eliminate the abstract landmark role without losing 
anything. However, I think this would just create unnecessary work.

6. In the HTML 5 mapping, map HTML section to region only if region has a 
label.

7. In the core AAM, only expose role region in the platform accessibility 
APIs if the region has a label. (Note, this is only for role region and 
not any of its subclasses).

8. Specify accessible name as required for role region and explicitly 
override that requirement (set it false) for each of the concrete landmark 
subclass roles.

9. Consider adding the following text to the prose for role region (not 
sure this is necessary):
"Assistive technologies and user agents MAY provide landmark navigation 
functionality for elements with role region and an accessible name."

Taken together, I believe this set of changes will:
1. eliminate all the confusion described in the notes associated with 
action 1440.
2. Enable legacy implementations to continue working.
3. Continue to give AT vendors the flexibility they have today in UX 
design.

Matt King
IBM Senior Technical Staff Member
I/T Chief Accessibility Strategist
IBM BT/CIO - Global Workforce and Web Process Enablement 
Phone: (503) 578-2329, Tie line: 731-7398
mattking@us.ibm.com