Indicating swipe actions on an element

Hi all!

While making the UI for Firefox OS accessible, we're running into the 
situation where we need to indicate that an item can not only be 
activated in the normal way, but that certain swipe actions can also be 
performed. An analogous example can be found in iOS in the status bar, 
when VoiceOver is active:

1. In many cases, double-tapping any status bar icon scrolls the main 
view all the way to the top.
2. At the same time, swiping down with 3 fingers while any of the status 
bar items has accessiblity focus will bring up the notification center.
3. And 3 finger swipe upwards will bring up the control center (in iOS 7 
and above).

We'd like to see a semantic means be added to WAI-ARIA to specify that a 
user can execute the accessible form of a swipe to perform additional 
actions.

Initial thinking goes along the lines of a new attribute called 
aria-swipedirection with an atomic list of valid attribute values of 
"up", "down", "left" and "right".

When specified, assistive technologies can assume that, when a 
particular swipe action is being requested by them, the element would be 
behaving accordingly. In addition, this would allow assistive 
technologies to provide tutor messages similar to what can be heard 
spoken by VoiceOver in iOS when a status bar icon is touched.

The attribute would be applicable to any element that the author intends 
to react to swiping gestures (for example swipe left to delete an item, 
swipe down open the notifications etc.).

Points I'm not sure about:
1. How this would map to platform APIs other than an object attribute 
(like in IA2 and ATK). Probably something that can be covered by an 
IndieUI supported action set.
2. It's very specific to touch interfaces. But then, so is role "key" 
that we also proposed. :-)

This is not a formal proposal yet.

Thoughts?

Marco

Received on Thursday, 22 May 2014 05:29:10 UTC