ARIA 1.1 issue with role=region spec text and implied usage

This came up yesterday, and it's something I wished to raise regarding the spec definition for the region role at
http://www.w3.org/TR/wai-aria-1.1/#region
Which states:

"A large perceivable section of a web page or document, that is important enough to be included in a page summary or table of contents, for example, an area of the page containing live sporting event statistics."

In practice however, there are many valid uses for named regions that don't fit this definition, such as the following:

<div role="region" aria-label="breadcrumbs">
... breadcrumb structure ...
</div>

Amongst many others, none of which fit into the 'large structure that ties into the table of contents' definition mentioned in the spec, which is confusing developers who simply want to define a specific region on the page for a specific navigable purpose.

The helpful aspect of the above usage, is that it puts visually oriented regions into the region list for ATs, making it easy to find and navigate to specific regions of interest. However the spec text actively discourages this.

Can this be modified to be less restrictive?

Received on Thursday, 23 April 2015 18:49:55 UTC