RE: aria-level a required property for role="heading" or a supported property with an RFC SHOULD for authors

Based on our call today, I've added a qualifier in the Implementation Notes column at
http://whatsock.com/training/matrices/#heading
It's still somewhat strongly worded, so if anyone has a problem with the wording of this, please let me know.

Just to simplify my view, if heading levels are optional, ATs and browsers will never provide consistent UIs, because they will always do something different by guessing. If markup structures were always well nested within parent/child containers, then it would be possible for AT/browsers to guess somewhat accurately, but in reality, headings often have no meaningful nesting structure at all.

One additional issue with automated browser algorithms as the one mentioned during the call, there is often no way to override this when it's wrong.

I'm also concerned about the promotion of 'lazy coding', where it's okay for developers to just ignore valuable attributes because in the spec they are 'optional'.

From: Richard Schwerdtfeger [mailto:schwer@us.ibm.com]
Sent: Thursday, June 18, 2015 10:26 AM
To: WAI Protocols & Formats
Subject: aria-level a required property for role="heading" or a supported property with an RFC SHOULD for authors


The ARIA task force had issue that pertained to making aria-level a required property vs. a supported property for role="heading".

We would like list feedback as to whether this should required or rather have an RFC 2119 SHOULD for its use as a supported property in role "heading".

Please see the minutes of the discussion: http://www.w3.org/2015/06/18-aria-minutes.html


Rich Schwerdtfeger