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

Birkirin ARIA 1.1, html 5 sections without labels are going to be mapped 
to a generic container role, not to region. Thus, only html5 sections with 
labels are landmark regions.

Matt King
IBM Senior Technical Staff Member
I/T Chief Accessibility Strategist
IBM BT/CIO - Global Workforce and Web Process Enablement 
Phone: (503) 578-2329, Tie line: 731-7398
mattking@us.ibm.com



From:   Birkir Gunnarsson <birkir.gunnarsson@deque.com>
To:     Bryan Garaventa <bryan.garaventa@ssbbartgroup.com>, 
Cc:     "W3C WAI Protocols & Formats" <public-pfwg@w3.org>
Date:   04/23/2015 12:12 PM
Subject:        Re: ARIA 1.1 issue with role=region spec text and implied 
usage



+1 to Bryan's comments.
I have found this technique to be very useful in cases where standard
ARIA landmark roles are not applicable and where it would not be
appropriate to add headings to mark the beginning of region content.
Another example here would be code examples (enclosed in code or pre
tag), regions that are controlled by other  elements (identified by
the aria-controls attribute) but do not fall under standard navigation
patterns such as tab/tabpanel and regions that are visually identified
by their relative location on a page (left hand navigation) (yes, some
of these can be identified with the navigation role).
Also the html5 section element is mapped to role="region" by default
and that element's description is not as restrictive as the ARIA spec
description of the region role.
I have filed issues with a.t. vendors that regions with an explicit
label from author be included in the list of landmarks for the page,
and this is the behavior exhibited by most screen readers (though not
all).
-Birkir




On 4/23/15, Bryan Garaventa <bryan.garaventa@ssbbartgroup.com> wrote:
> 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?
>
>