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

John,

You make very good points. The @aria-current is not a substitute for 
labeling regions, including main. It helps the user understand which 
element in a navigation region or progress indicator is marked (visually) 
as current. But, it is not a substitute for labeling or titling the page 
properly. In fact, it may be very common in some types of design templates 
for main to have aria-labelledby referring to the same element that has 
aria-current set on it.

Matt King
IBM Senior Technical Staff Member
I/T Chief Accessibility Strategist
IBM BT/CIO - Global Workforce and Web Process Enablement 
Phone: (503) 578-2329, Tie line: 731-7398
mattking@us.ibm.com



From:   "Gunderson, Jon R" <jongund@illinois.edu>
To:     Steve Faulkner <faulkner.steve@gmail.com>, Birkir Gunnarsson 
<birkir.gunnarsson@deque.com>, 
Cc:     Joanmarie Diggs <jdiggs@igalia.com>, Bryan Garaventa 
<bryan.garaventa@ssbbartgroup.com>, Léonie Watson 
<LWatson@paciellogroup.com>, W3C WAI Protocols & Formats 
<public-pfwg@w3.org>
Date:   11/11/2014 06:27 AM
Subject:        RE: Should user agents be expected to expose the presence 
of an   aria-current descendant?



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> 
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