Re: Proposal to extend the support of aria-orientation

Bryan, I think you should raise the issue and then we just need to get it 
on the Thursday agenda. The utility is pretty clear.

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



From:   Bryan Garaventa <bryan.garaventa@ssbbartgroup.com>
To:     W3C WAI Protocols & Formats <public-pfwg@w3.org>, 
Date:   12/10/2014 12:11 PM
Subject:        Proposal to extend the support of aria-orientation



This is something that came up during the last APG call, so I'd like to 
float this here before filing a spec issue for it to get peoples' view on 
it.

Currently the scope of aria-orientation is very limited, E.G
http://www.w3.org/TR/wai-aria/states_and_properties#aria-orientation

The problem is that there are specific areas where this would be very 
useful, if not necessary, and there is currently no support for these 
implementations.

The first example has to do with menu constructs.

Menus don't always fall into the category of horizontal Menubar and 
vertical Menu only, but can be represented in different ways depending on 
the styling of the menu.

For example, a menu, triggered by an active element as a layer, may be 
represented horizontally as a flyout menu, and may switch between vertical 
and horizontal styling as is typically seen within megamenu constructs. 
When this is done, the keyboard interaction model is customized to fit the 
display, so that pressing the Right arrow will move to the next menu item 
in a horizontal flyout menu, or may open a submenu in a vertical menu, 
depending on how the menu is styled and implemented.

The problem from an AT perspective, is that there is no way to convey 
these differences, making it impossible for non-sighted screen reader 
users to know which keyboard interaction model is applied, because they 
can't see the styling of the menu. The assumption then is that all menus 
are vertical, which is incorrect and misleading to the user.

The availability of aria-orientation for the role of Menu would solve this 
however, allowing ATs to correctly convey this information to the user, 
regardless whether the container element received focus or the child menu 
item node for that widget.

The same is true for Tree constructs, where a tree may be represented as a 
downward facing branch instead of a left to right facing branch, so that 
the Down arrow is used to expand branch nodes instead of the Right arrow 
as is typically seen. This too would be a good candidate for knowing what 
the orientation is designed to do, in order to provide the correct 
feedback.

There may be other widget roles where this may be useful as well, but 
hopefully this outlines the importance of having this functionality be 
extended for better use and support.