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

What would happen to an atomic aria-live region if the aria-current property on that element were updated?

If updating the aria-current attribute fired an alert, aria-live could be used to announce the update to screen reader users as they are traversing the page.

Screen readers )or other assistive technologies= could handle this update on their end by announcing content of updated container with the words “is now current” or similar.

In other wordds:

<li aria-live=”polite” aria-atomic=”true” aria-current=”false”>Step 2 – Billing Information</li>

If updating aria-current from false to true caused an accessibility event to fire, assistive technologies could communicate this info along the lines of

“Step 2 – Billing Information is nowcurrent element on this page”

This way content authors could make this a function if desired and appropriate for the user.

 

From: Gunderson, Jon R [mailto:jongund@illinois.edu] 
Sent: Tuesday, November 11, 2014 9:26 AM
To: Steve Faulkner; 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?

 

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.


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Regards

SteveF

HTML 5.1 <http://www.w3.org/html/wg/drafts/html/master/>