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

You could imagine a process, e.g. of applying for a visa.

Process involves 3 steps:

Personal info

Education and professional info

Employer info

Each step can easily consist of more than one webpages including lists and
tabs (for personal info you have family including a page with tabs where you
select merital status, and fill in the inforrmation relevant to yours …
dependents and so on).

 

Your progress through the application is indicated with a list of links
where your current step in the process is indicated.

This cannot match the current page title, since each step consists of
multiple pages, some including tabs.

We could saturate the title element and make it very long to compensate for
the complexity, but it is generally not popular with web developers in my
experience, plus end users start losing track of page titles that are overly
long.

 

I have not seen this precise scenario, but I have seen similar processes and
pages that are actually part of two separate processes, where current status
of each is indicated using CSS in two separate lists on the same page.

 

There is no aria landmark or labelling that I can currently think of that
would conveniently indicate active element in a set of elements.

We would not want to create a landmark of a single element (if we were, it
would have to be a region, since navigation would be misleading, and region
sits in this rather uncomfortable area between a landmark and not a landmark
and subsequently assistive technology support is inconsistent).

 

From: Gunderson, Jon R [mailto:jongund@illinois.edu] 
Sent: Wednesday, November 26, 2014 2:46 PM
To: Dominic Mazzoni; Joseph Scheuhammer
Cc: Alexander Surkov; LWatson@PacielloGroup.com; Matthew King; Joanie Diggs;
White, Jason J; Bryan Garaventa; public-pfwg@w3.org
Subject: Re: ACTION-1442: Draft spec text for aria-current and
aria-currentfor

 

Dominic,

 

The most compelling use case that I have heard for ARIA-CURRENT is when you
have a list of links and one of the links is to the page (or view) you are
currently on.  ARIA-CURRENT could tell you that this is the link to this
page (or view).

 

Another use case for indicating the current step in a list of steps, I am
not as convinced about this use case since I think the primary way to
indicate the step should be through page titling, landmark labels and/or
headings.

 

Jon

 

From: Dominic Mazzoni <dmazzoni@google.com>
Date: Wednesday, November 26, 2014 at 1:00 PM
To: Joseph Scheuhammer <clown@alum.mit.edu>
Cc: Alexander Surkov <surkov.alexander@gmail.com>, Léonie Watson
<lwatson@paciellogroup.com>, Matthew King <mattking@us.ibm.com>, Joanie
Diggs <diggs@igalia.com>, "White, Jason J" <jjwhite@ets.org>, Bryan
Garaventa <bryan.garaventa@ssbbartgroup.com>, Jon Gunderson
<jongund@illinois.edu>, "public-pfwg@w3.org" <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>
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?