Re: Question about a rowgroup note

> On Apr 1, 2015, at 09:46, Joanmarie Diggs <jdiggs@igalia.com> wrote:
>
> When I sent this message a couple of days ago [1], I was operating under
> the impression that we'd have new tbody, thead, and tfoot ARIA roles --
> as I alluded to in that message.
>
> Having explicitly asked about tbody and friends [2], I am starting to
> suspect that this might not come to pass after all. :)

If tables and other structures for which we presently lack ARIA roles are likely to appear in SVG (or any host language besides HTML that does not possess its own markup for such structures), it will be necessary to enhance ARIA semantics to include corresponding roles.

Parts of the mapping of HTML elements/attributes to accessibility APIs proceed via ARIA roles. Where no appropriate role exists, the mapping runs directly from the HTML element/attribute combination to system-specific accessibility APIs.

I think this group needs to determine to what extent the remaining gaps in the list of ARIA roles should be filled so that the semantic distinctions available in HTML become expressible in ARIA, and hence expressible in other host languages that lack the necessary native semantics.

Although ARIA is formally independent of its host language, it seems to me that HTML-dependent assumptions have found their way into the design of the ontology through the selection of supported roles. This may once have been reasonable for practical purposes, but increasingly it will not be - SVG now supports ARIA and additional host languages are possible in principle.

Returning to the specific case before us, if table structures are likely to appear in SVG documents, then the only means of capturing the semantic distinctions necessary for accessibility purposes will be to apply ARIA. In that case, suitable roles should be defined to encode table structures (including thead, tbody and so forth).


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Received on Wednesday, 1 April 2015 16:31:56 UTC