RE: ACTION-1442: Draft spec text for aria-current and aria-currentfor

>Is there a sue case for aria-current and aria-selected to be on the same element at the same time?

Matt had a good one, where one node in a tree is active, however selection follows the keyboard focus, which aren't always the same. For example pressing the spacebar or enter will cause the node of the tree to load, but otherwise does not when focus moves between the various tree items.

The reason why this is important, is because screen readers expose the nodes that have selection, which can be seen in JAWS using Firefox on the following page:
http://whatsock.com/tsg/Coding%20Arena/ARIA%20Trees/Tree%20%28External%20XML%29/demo.htm

So, if you arrow down the page in the Virtual Buffer, you can see that the only node that is announced is the one that includes aria-selected='true', and no others, in the same manner that a standard Select element only exposes the currently selected option name.

So, in this case, aria-current could identify which tree node is currently loaded, without effecting the announcement of the currently focused tree node that is selected.

This is why I don't like the idea of having IE use the same state flag for both aria-current and aria-selected, because this distinction would be impossible for ATs to detect in the accessibility tree, and then they would have to scrape the DOM instead, which is counterproductive.

>On items that are multi-selectable there can be more than one item with aria-selected="true", this seems to be a potential difference between aria-current
>and aria-selected use cases, a set can only have one aria-current="true".   But then that begs the question of what defines the set of things?

The set of things would be the context of how the attribute is applied, for instance it may be within a role=region+aria-label container, or within a list, and so on. The grouping mechanism would be the context of the region and the shared element types within that region.

>Maybe the first implementation of aria-current should be limited to role=link items and be limited to indicating that this link is the link to the page
>or state of the current page.

I think this would drastically diminish the value of the attribute.

From: Gunderson, Jon R [mailto:jongund@illinois.edu]
Sent: Wednesday, November 19, 2014 4:51 PM
To: LWatson@PacielloGroup.com; 'Matthew King'; 'Joseph Scheuhammer'
Cc: public-pfwg@w3.org
Subject: Re: ACTION-1442: Draft spec text for aria-current and aria-currentfor

Is there a sue case for aria-current and aria-selected to be on the same element at the same time?

Could something in practice look like this:

<div role="xxx" aria-current="true" aria-selected="false">

Can a set of items ever have more than one item with aria-current="true"?

On items that are multi-selectable there can be more than one item with aria-selected="true", this seems to be a potential difference between aria-current and aria-selected use cases, a set can only have one aria-current="true".   But then that begs the question of what defines the set of things?

Maybe the first implementation of aria-current should be limited to role=link items and be limited to indicating that this link is the link to the page or state of the current page.

Jon


From: Léonie Watson <lwatson@paciellogroup.com<mailto:lwatson@paciellogroup.com>>
Organization: The Paciello Group (TPG)
Reply-To: Léonie Watson <lwatson@paciellogroup.com<mailto:lwatson@paciellogroup.com>>
Date: Wednesday, November 19, 2014 at 2:05 PM
To: Matthew King <mattking@us.ibm.com<mailto:mattking@us.ibm.com>>, Joseph Scheuhammer <clown@alum.mit.edu<mailto:clown@alum.mit.edu>>
Cc: "public-pfwg@w3.org<mailto:public-pfwg@w3.org>" <public-pfwg@w3.org<mailto:public-pfwg@w3.org>>
Subject: RE: ACTION-1442: Draft spec text for aria-current and aria-currentfor
Resent-From: "public-pfwg@w3.org<mailto:public-pfwg@w3.org>" <public-pfwg@w3.org<mailto:public-pfwg@w3.org>>
Resent-Date: Wednesday, November 19, 2014 at 2:05 PM

I've made a few updates to the draft text based on today's discussions. I've changed the examples to include one that isn't link based, and have changed the note to use the wiki use case Matt mentioned earlier because I think it's easier to understand.

Aria-current attribute

Indicates the element that represents the current item within a container or set of related elements.

The aria-current attribute indicates whether an element represents what is current (true), or not current (false). If the aria-current attribute is false or undefined, the aria-current state of an element SHOULD not be exposed by User Agents or assistive technologies.

The aria-current attribute is used when an element within a set of related elements is visually styled to indicate it is the current item in the set. For example it can be used to indicate a link within a set of navigation links, where the link is visually styled to represent the currently displayed page. It could also be used to indicate a link that is visually styled to represent the current step in a process, or an image that is visually highlighted as the current component of a flowchart.

Note:
The aria-current attribute is similar to the aria-selected attribute, but there are important differences. For example, aria-current would be used to identify the link representing the page currently displayed on the wiki, whereas aria-selected would be used to indicate that the link had been selected for an action (such as moving the page to another location.

Characteristics of aria-current
Used in roles: All elements of the base markup.
Value: true/false

Values of aria-current
true: The element is current.
false (default): The element is not current

Léonie.

--
Senior Accessibility Engineer, TPG
@LeonieWatson @PacielloGroup