Re: PFWG-ISSUE-701: Modify aria-owns such that the idref order pertains to the order of the associated children

Alex,

On 2015-02-15 11:07 AM, Alexander Surkov wrote:
> The order the referred elements listed in the value should be 
> preserved when their parent-child relationship is set. All explicit 
> unreferred children should be considered followed aria-owns elements

That sounds right to me.

But, there is text in the spec for aria-owns [1]:

"Authors SHOULD NOT use aria-owns as a replacement for the DOM 
hierarchy. If the relationship is represented in the DOM, do not use 
aria-owns."

What if the author does the following -- a modification of your example:

<div role="grid">
<div role="row" aria-owns="c2 c1">
   <div role="gridcell" id="c1">cell1</div>
   <div role="gridcell" id="c2">cell2</div>
</div>
</div>

1. The document order of the cells in the row are c1, c2.
2. The aria-owns order is c2, c1.
3. Author's shouldn't use aria-owns in this case, since the parent/child 
relationship is expressed in the DOM.

Nonetheless, what should the browser do when it encounters this 
situation?  Respect the aria-owns ordering or the DOM ordering?  I don't 
see a compelling reason for either approach.  Perhaps the spec should 
simply stipulate which ordering wins.

However, what if the author uses table markup?

<table role="grid">
<tr aria-owns="c2 c1">
   <td role="gridcell" id="c1">cell1</td>
   <td role="gridcell" id="c2">cell2</td>
</tr>
</table>

It's more of an issue here since there is an inconsistency between the 
conceptual tabular organization and the one exposed through 
accessibility APIs.  I wonder if there are use cases where authors 
cannot help expressing the child order one way in the DOM, but intend a 
different semantic ordering.

[1] http://w3c.github.io/aria/aria/aria.html#aria-owns

-- 
;;;;joseph.

'Array(16).join("wat" - 1) + " Batman!"'
            - G. Bernhardt -

Received on Tuesday, 17 February 2015 16:16:30 UTC