Re: role=toolbar should become landmark role in ARIA 1.1

I am not in favor of this. Toolbars are composit widgets that contain other
widgets. Traditionally, if you look at MS Office implementations, keyboard
interaction has been implemented for these, and this was later expanded to
the ribbons in MS Office and Explorer etc.

On the Mac, Toolbars are also container elements that you have to interact
with with Vo+Shift+DownArrow to get to the controls.

In many web applications, arrow left and right within a toolbar have been
accepted as quasi-standards to navigate within the confines of one toolbar,
in application mode. A hotkey like Tab or F6 or the like would move to the
next toolbar container.

Labeling them is definitely not only useful, but should be mandatory, to
know what a toolbar is for. Except for single toolbars, most Apple software
does this nowadays, and the toolbars in MS Office (ribbons) have names, too.

So conceptually, these are much more widgets than they are landmarks, since
keyboard interaction usually dictates an application-like interaction
anyway.

Marco


On Wed, Jul 1, 2015 at 3:22 PM, Birkir Gunnarsson <
birkir.gunnarsson@deque.com> wrote:

> I am neutral on it, slightly towards it being a good idea.
> We need to make sure not to map too many things as landmarks, else
> pages become "unlandmarkable" (when pages contain 20 or 30 or 50
> landmarks their usefulness as navigation aids evaporates).
> Given that pages generally don´t contain too many toolbars this might
> be all right.
> The risk is when toolbars are used (correctly I would say) to group
> together commonly used functions that appear multiple times on a page
> )such as a social sharing toolbar that appears next to each news story
> preview for instance).
> I also see this problem with the article tag mapping to role-'article'.
> I would propose that, like the tradition with region, toolbars are
> only mapped as landmarks if they have an explicit name assigned via
> aria-label (though it is actually a requirement in the spec if page
> contains more than one toolbar).
> -Birkir
>
> On 7/1/15, Schnabel, Stefan <stefan.schnabel@sap.com> wrote:
> > 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
> >
> > SAP SE | Dietmar-Hopp-Allee 16 | 69190 Walldorf, Germany
> > T: +49 (6227) 7-65652 F: +49 (6227) 78-29877
> > mailto:stefan.schnabel@sap.com W: www.sap.com<http://www.sap.com/>
> >
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