role=toolbar should become landmark role in ARIA 1.1

All,

I'd like to hear opinions on the subject of this post.

We often encounter the situation that toolbars in business applications running in the web are stuffed with functions (10+ buttons, combos etc.)

For ease of access, it would be desirable to use landmark navigation features built in in user agents and assistive technology to directly navigate to the toolbars.

The classy approach is to "wrap" a div with role toolbar in another div with e.g. role=region labelled for instance "tools" and then to proceed navigation to the inner content.
But this "costs" an additional parent DOM node and is therefore often subject of discussion with Web UI performance groups wanting the leanest DOM possible.

Another proposal is to provide access keys to buttons inside using the (buggy) access key mechanism or even to provide custom JS for keyboard navigation.

Having role=toolbar as a landmark role in ARIA 1.1 would avoid wrapping and ease navigation to functions without additional effort from authoring side.

Thoughts?

Best Regards
Stefan


Dr. Stefan Schnabel
Senior User Experience Design Specialist
P&I Customer Innovation & Services
ASCOT - Standards Excellence

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