I think the major benefit is when aria-current is on a link, users will know it is a link to the current page they are on.
I don’t this we should be thinking of aria-current as some type of alternative to providing good page titling, useful headings (H1-H6) and landmark labeling to help users orient to the page they are on or the step in a sequence of pages.
Jon
From: Steve Faulkner [mailto:faulkner.steve@gmail.com]
Sent: Tuesday, November 11, 2014 6:17 AM
To: Birkir Gunnarsson
Cc: Joanmarie Diggs; Bryan Garaventa; Léonie Watson; W3C WAI Protocols & Formats
Subject: Re: Should user agents be expected to expose the presence of an aria-current descendant?
On 11 November 2014 03:26, Birkir Gunnarsson <birkir.gunnarsson@deque.com<mailto:birkir.gunnarsson@deque.com>> wrote:
Aria-current is an accessible alternative to what is frequently presented through CSS styling alone, in a way that is entirely inaccessible to assistive technologies.
I don't think it needs to perform magic (although nobody would object to it).
I think if we attached too much functionality and capacity to what started out as a simple attribute, we might start getting muddled in the implementation details.
I think being able to use this attribute to indicate currently active element in a set of elements, and leave the implementation and features of that up to assistive technologies, that should be sufficient.
After all, in most cases moving to the next steps in a user flow usually requires loading a new page, in which case an accessible page title will back up the change in the aria-current attribute.
++1
--
Regards
SteveF
HTML 5.1<http://www.w3.org/html/wg/drafts/html/master/>