Re: Thoughts on posinset and setsize with respect to menus with separators?

That sounds like a lot of extra words for no real benefit.
I am not sure that the separators have that much semantic value.
It would be much cleaner to completely ignore the separators when it comes 
to posinset and setsize.
Are there situations where separators in menus are truly useful to a 
screen reader user?

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:   Alexander Surkov <surkov.alexander@gmail.com>
To:     Joanmarie Diggs <jdiggs@igalia.com>, 
Cc:     "W3C WAI Protocols & Formats" <public-pfwg@w3.org>
Date:   04/27/2015 10:56 AM
Subject:        Re: Thoughts on posinset and setsize with respect to menus 
with separators?



Should we have subgroups? For example, if screen reader announced when you 
enter into menu, "menu of 6 items, 3 subgroups, "Sheets help", 1 of 1, 
first subgroup".

On Fri, Apr 17, 2015 at 12:52 PM, Joanmarie Diggs <jdiggs@igalia.com> 
wrote:
Hey all.

Today is another Remove Hacks from Orca Day. :) Today's Featured Hack to
Kill is related to posinset and setsize for menus, which was put into
place because what at least some users expect does not seem to jive with
what I'm seeing in the wild. Two examples, one from Google Docs and one
from Firefox, both functionally the same.

In Google Docs' Sheets, there is a Help menu with the following
on-screen items:

1 "Sheets Help"
2 non-navigable separator
3 "Send feedback to Google"
4 non-navigable separator
5 "Function list"
6 "Keyboard shortcuts"

To me, there are four menu items: That's how it looks visually. And
non-visually, if I press Alt+Shift+H in the hopes of finding a
particular item, I can press Down Arrow four times before it's time to
give up if I haven't found it.

As for the posinset and setsize values, they are:

Sheets Help: posinset 1, setsize 1
Send feedback to Google: posinset 1, setsize 1
Function list: posinset 1, setsize 2
Keyboard shortcuts: posinset 2, setsize 2

I can understand the rationale for these values: There are visual
separators grouping things. Though it's not a strong grouping. If a
subset of the menu's items were really a distinct group, I'd expect them
to be contained in a submenu. However, a screen reader presenting the
position of these items would say something like "Sheets Help. 1 of 1"
possibly leading the user to conclude that the desired item (Keyboard
shortcuts) is not in the Help menu.

Similarly, the Firefox File menu is divided into four groups with
non-navigable separators, and Firefox exposes posinset and setsize
values based on those weak-grouping subdivisions. So I'm thinking this
is indeed by design. But is this design really what we (and users) want?

Because of this "feature," Orca is ignoring posinset and setsize for
menu items. Orca shouldn't do that, and I plan to rip that out. But when
I do, I anticipate Orca users will complain because the group to them is
the set of menu items in the menu; not the subsets delineated by the
non-navigable separators, and the post-hack-removal presentation of
menus in Firefox and web apps will be inconsistent with menus from the
rest of the platform.

Curious as to what you all think. Thanks!
--joanie