Re: Should user agents be expected to expose the presence of an aria-current descendant?

Hey Léonie.

On 11/10/2014 04:53 PM, Léonie Watson wrote:
> Joanmarie Diggs wrote:
> "During today's ARIA call we were discussing aria-current. The group consensus includes the fact that aria-current can be applied to any container. That's fine with me. And presumably the current item does not have to be an immediate descendant of that container. Also fine with me.
> My concern, however, is how an AT can identify what the current item in a given container is in order to present that item to the user."
> 
> If I understand correctly, aria-current would be applied to the current item, not nescessarily to its container. For example the link that represents the current page within a navigation block, or the image that represents the current chunk of a flowchart.

I guess apply isn't the right word. Sorry. What I mean, to use your
examples, are:

Given a link that represents the current page within a navigation block,
the link representing the current page gets aria-current="true". Other
links in that same navigation block get aria-current="false". But
the context/scope/container to which the currentness applies is the
navigation block.

Likewise, the "current" image in a flowchart gets aria-current="true".
Other elements in the flowchart would get aria-current="false". The
context/scope/container to which the currentness applies is the flowchart.

Getting back to the form:

> If the steps of the form were presented as a progress indicator, it would be appropriate to use aria-current to indicate which step was currently displayed. I don't believe it would be appropriate to use aria-current to indicate the current step, without the context being available.

The steps of my hypothetical form are presented as a progress indicator
(I think). In other words, there would be some descendant of the form
element, made up of a series of images. The image that tells sighted
users "you are here on step 2" would get aria-current="true". Right? If
so, the problem to be solved is: After the user presses the next button,
the AT gets an state-changed:focused event for the input field that the
form autofocused, say "Address". The AT should first present to the user
"Step 2. Billing information" which is the image with
aria-current="true". How can the AT identify and locate the image with
aria-current="true"?

--joanie

Received on Monday, 10 November 2014 22:09:40 UTC