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

>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"?

Actually this isn't a problem, and goes beyond the scope of aria-current.

Basically, since aria-current can be applied in any context where grouped elements display a visually distinguishable difference between the others and the current element, there is no way for ATs to predict where this will be, and there is no need to convey this unless the element is encountered during navigation by the user.

So, for active elements this would occur while tabbing or setting focus to or by using arrow key navigation like within the Virtual Buffer when applicable, and for inactive elements like images this would occur while browsing static elements on the page in a similar manner as with standard navigation. So the current state/property value would be conveyed at the same time as the element's role and name.

It might be useful for ATs to provide a keystroke for quickly jumping between current elements on the page, but this would be up to the AT.

So in your example, when the step changes and focus is set to the container, the normal naming calculation would apply, then the user would navigate down into the content as normal and discover the newly set current step at the same time they encounter the step role/name, or focus can be set to the step container element itself, such as within a heading, and have all of this conveyed at the same time as well without having to do any extra calculations because focus will be set at the same location.

This would also avoid query naming loops that might occur if current elements are nested within the same structure if part of parent/child subnodes, which too may be possible.




-----Original Message-----
From: Joanmarie Diggs [mailto:jdiggs@igalia.com] 
Sent: Monday, November 10, 2014 2:09 PM
To: LWatson@PacielloGroup.com; 'W3C WAI Protocols & Formats'
Subject: 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 23:11:28 UTC