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

Most implementations honor display:none for accessibility APIs.  Display:none is used in a lot of core functions on sites, like hiding an showing menus and dialogs.  I really dislike the pattern of showing things that are display:none to screen readers of AAPIs.  I think it muddles this core functionality, and it seems like a way to let in lots of bugs.

I wonder if the glyph scenario could be handled with an explicit role, but one that is less invasive that the role=text proposal. Maybe something like

<p>I <span role="glyph” aria-label="love">♥</span> New York.</p>

Could read “I love New York”

It could even be called role=text, but I don’t like the idea of it removing structure from all its children.  It reminds me of some early web disasters with <pre>


From: Matthew King [mailto:mattking@us.ibm.com]
Sent: Tuesday, November 11, 2014 6:11 PM
To: Cynthia Shelly
Cc: Steve Faulkner; Fred Esch; James Craig; Joanmarie Diggs; White, Jason J; W3C WAI Protocols & Formats
Subject: RE: First draft of ARIA 1.1. "text" role

Cynthia wrote:
> I wonder if it might make more sense to change the definition of
> presentation or none to cover this scenario
>
> <p>I <img src="heart.gif" alt="love" role="none"> New York.</p>
>
> to read "I love New York" instead of "I New York"
>
> I think I would achieve that by not creating an accessible api node
> for the image, and just having a paragraph with text that reads "I
> love New York"

Yes!! This is exactly what I was saying. I can hear some potentially arguing that might break some sites that were silly enough to label eye candy and then mark it with role presentation to make it disappear, relying on the 1.0 implementation. But that problem would eventually disappear and we would have a simpler, more consistent world in the end.

Cynthia continues:
> The glyph scenario is different, because it is text, and is often
> read as a single character.  But, do we need a role for that?  Would
> this work instead?
>
> <p>I <span aria-label="love">♥</span> New York.</p>
>
> Then, in the AAPI rendering, we would replace the ♥ with the string
> "love".

I do not think we should replace the content of a span with a label. That is just as problematic as the text role. And, there is a general problem with labeling generic elements like div and span that essentially map to none. Screen readers and screen reader users really do not know what to do with such things.

What does it mean to label a purposeless container? For that matter, what does it mean to label a static text node like <p> or <li> ... it really does not make sense. People come up with examples all the time, but there is always a better way to structure the content so that the semantics are more clear.

Even though it is more markup, I think the 2nd example should be written as:

<p>I <span aria-hidden="true">♥</span><span aria-hidden="false" style="display:none">love</span> New York.</p>

This is very explicit, and I think less dangerous.

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<mailto:mattking@us.ibm.com>

Cynthia Shelly <cyns@microsoft.com<mailto:cyns@microsoft.com>> wrote on 11/11/2014 05:41:53 PM:

> From: Cynthia Shelly <cyns@microsoft.com<mailto:cyns@microsoft.com>>
> To: "White, Jason J" <jjwhite@ets.org<mailto:jjwhite@ets.org>>, Fred Esch/Arlington/
> IBM@IBMUS, Matthew King/Fishkill/IBM@IBMUS,
> Cc: Steve Faulkner <faulkner.steve@gmail.com<mailto:faulkner.steve@gmail.com>>, James Craig
> <jcraig@apple.com<mailto:jcraig@apple.com>>, Joanmarie Diggs <jdiggs@igalia.com<mailto:jdiggs@igalia.com>>, W3C WAI
> Protocols & Formats <public-pfwg@w3.org<mailto:public-pfwg@w3.org>>
> Date: 11/11/2014 05:42 PM
> Subject: RE: First draft of ARIA 1.1. "text" role
>
> I wonder if it might make more sense to change the definition of
> presentation or none to cover this scenario
>
> <p>I <img src="heart.gif" alt="love" role="none"> New York.</p>
>
> to read "I love New York" instead of "I New York"
>
> I think I would achieve that by not creating an accessible api node
> for the image, and just having a paragraph with text that reads "I
> love New York"
>
> The glyph scenario is different, because it is text, and is often
> read as a single character.  But, do we need a role for that?  Would
> this work instead?
>
> <p>I <span aria-label="love">♥</span> New York.</p>
>
> Then, in the AAPI rendering, we would replace the ♥ with the string
> "love".  I'm not sure we need a role to do that.
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: White, Jason J [mailto:jjwhite@ets.org]
> Sent: Tuesday, November 11, 2014 1:53 PM
> To: Fred Esch; Matthew King
> Cc: Steve Faulkner; James Craig; Joanmarie Diggs; W3C WAI Protocols & Formats
> Subject: RE: First draft of ARIA 1.1. "text" role
>
>
>
> >-----Original Message-----
> >From: Fred Esch [mailto:fesch@us.ibm.com]
> >Sent: Tuesday, November 11, 2014 4:45 PM
> >To: Matthew King
> >Cc: Steve Faulkner; James Craig; Joanmarie Diggs; W3C WAI Protocols &
> >Formats
> >Subject: Re: First draft of ARIA 1.1. "text" role
> >
> >+1 to what Matt said.
> >This has more down side than up side. Authors will be confused by
> >declaring text as text with a text alternative and/or aria-label.
> >Accessibility does not benefit from being this complex.
> >
>
> To clarify my position, the use cases are real and important.
> However, ARIA isn't the right means of addressing them, as it's too
> broad - it works via the accessibility interfaces and does not
> target, for example, speech output or braille output specifically or
> independently of one another.
>
>
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