RE: First draft of ARIA 1.1. "text" role



>-----Original Message-----
>The first set of examples:
>
>  <p>I <span role="text img" aria-label="love">♥︎</span> New York.</p>
>  <p>My <span role="text img" aria-label="heart">♥︎</span> bleeds.</p>
>  <span role="text" aria-label="3 of 5 stars">★★★☆☆︎</span>
>
>makes a lot of sense to me: You want to provide a better spoken
>representation than you'd get from sending those non-alphanumeric text
>characters to whatever speech synthesizer is being used, so you need to
>prevent the inline text from being folded/flattened into the parent. And
>there's actual (rendered) text there, so role="text" seems like the
>obvious solution both from the authoring standpoint (text is text) and
>from the accessibility API mapping standpoint (text roles should
>implement the accessible text interface in order to provide access to
>the text at a given character offset, text selection, text attributes,
>etc.)

This makes sense to me too, but it has an associated risk that authors will use aria-label to customize spoken presentation as you describe, creating corresponding difficulties for braille rendering. For good reasons, aria-label is honoured by assistive technologies in general, regardless of what kind of output device is in use. In consequence, authors who are targeting speech-based user agents or assistive technologies can  make the content worse for braille readers by exploiting this mechanism.

If customization of speech output is desired, as it should be, then we need to encouraging implementation of the CSS 3 Speech module, SSML, or other appropriate standards that are confined to speech and which do not operate by modifying what is delivered to all assistive technologies via accessibility APIs.

Are there legitimate use cases for this role that do not involve replacing text in order to enhance a spoken rendering? Obviously, attempts to enhance braille rendering via this mechanism would be equally problematic for speech output. The difficulty is a general one.


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Received on Tuesday, 11 November 2014 14:21:18 UTC