>This really feels like "selected" to me. Can you explain why you feel aria-selected would be a poor choice here, or a case where aria-current would be
>different than aria-selected?
In this case, they are quite similar, besides that aria-selected isn’t supported on links.
Even if aria-selected were extended to cover this though, it wouldn’t cover scenarios when an element can be both selected and current at the same time, but should not be mapped to the same property or convey the same information, as with your example of a multiselectable listbox and conveying which element is currently focused, which applies too, as well as an interactive tree where selection is used to convey which element is focused and aria-current is used to convey which node is currently loaded, even both may be different depending on user interaction.
Another issue is that aria-selected applies to children of interactive widgets only, and this is how it maps in the accessibility API, as Cynthia discovered when finding out that it can’t be mapped to images in UIA. The scope of aria-selected is actually very narrow.
The aria-current attribute should be a simpler, globally accessible method for conveying current element information without causing any adverse behavioral implecations regardless which element it is applied to.
From: Dominic Mazzoni [mailto:dmazzoni@google.com]
Sent: Wednesday, November 26, 2014 11:01 AM
To: Joseph Scheuhammer
Cc: Alexander Surkov; LWatson@PacielloGroup.com; Matthew King; Joanie Diggs; White, Jason J; Bryan Garaventa; Gunderson, Jon R; public-pfwg@w3.org
Subject: Re: ACTION-1442: Draft spec text for aria-current and aria-currentfor
On Wed, Nov 26, 2014 at 10:28 AM, Joseph Scheuhammer <clown@alum.mit.edu<mailto:clown@alum.mit.edu>> wrote:
The example I gave using site navigation applies: http://idrc.ocad.ca/index.php/research-and-development/ongoing-projects. The site index can be navigated using up/down arrow keys, moving focus from link to link, but the "you-are-here" link doesn't change. Thus, "focus" is independent of "current" in the same container.
This really feels like "selected" to me. Can you explain why you feel aria-selected would be a poor choice here, or a case where aria-current would be different than aria-selected?