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

The easy think is change aria-level to a required state for headings. This
would be consistent with HTML which has an implied level for each heading
tag. This adds no bloat.


Rich Schwerdtfeger



From: James Craig <jcraig@apple.com>
To: WAI Protocols & Formats <public-pfwg@w3.org>
Date: 06/19/2015 04:16 AM
Subject: Re: aria-level a required property for role="heading" or a
            supported property  with an RFC SHOULD for authors



I'm not convinced this is solving a real problem.

ARIA is already somewhat bloated. We should not be adding *any* new things
there is a real need that can't be solved by an existing technology.
Authors can already define heading levels a number of ways.

1. Explicitly in the @aria-level attribute.
2. Dynamically with JavaScript.
3. Or undefined (no attribute) when the level is unknown or irrelevant.

 Please leave @aria-level an integer; throwing keywords on it adds
significant author confusion.

My vote is to leave @aria-level the way it is.

James



      On Jun 19, 2015, at 1:03 AM, Schnabel, Stefan <
      stefan.schnabel@sap.com> wrote:

      I second the „computed level“ approach since this leaves the leveling
      info to the user agent (derived by structure), which is favorable
      always when the UI framework doesn’t know exactly about the heading
      nesting and for some reasons the page is assembled from various
      sources (meaning that there is no “human” page author setting
      actively the heading levels).

            -      Stefan


      From: Gunderson, Jon R [mailto:jongund@illinois.edu]
      Sent: Donnerstag, 18. Juni 2015 23:38
      To: Richard Schwerdtfeger; John Foliot
      Cc: 'Joseph Scheuhammer'; 'Cynthia Shelly'; 'David Bolter'; 'Dominic
      Mazzoni'; 'James Craig'; 'WAI Protocols & Formats'; 'Alexander
      Surkov'
      Subject: RE: aria-level a required property for role="heading" or a
      supported property with an RFC SHOULD for authors

      Could there be a value that would indicate an automatically generate
      a computed level, for example:

      aria-level=”auto” would mean use the heading level of the previous
      heading in document order

      aria-level=”subsection” would mean use one heading level down from
      the previous heading in document order

      Jon


      From: Richard Schwerdtfeger [mailto:schwer@us.ibm.com]
      Sent: Thursday, June 18, 2015 4:30 PM
      To: John Foliot
      Cc: 'Joseph Scheuhammer'; 'Cynthia Shelly'; 'David Bolter'; 'Dominic
      Mazzoni'; 'James Craig'; 'WAI Protocols & Formats'; 'Alexander
      Surkov'
      Subject: RE: aria-level a required property for role="heading" or a
      supported property with an RFC SHOULD for authors



      Yes, but lack of a level provides no level context and it does not
      align well with an HTML document whose native elements ALL provide a
      level. The question is not what the default behavior is when you
      leave it off but rather what we should be requiring authors to do. I
      think Mac does the best you can do in the absence of a level.


      Rich Schwerdtfeger

      "John Foliot" ---06/18/2015 04:19:55 PM---+1, I have previously
      suggested that this is the better response (holy cow James, we're
      going 2 for

      From: "John Foliot" <john.foliot@deque.com>
      To: "'James Craig'" <jcraig@apple.com>, "'Joseph Scheuhammer'" <
      clown@alum.mit.edu>
      Cc: "'WAI Protocols & Formats'" <public-pfwg@w3.org>, "'Dominic
      Mazzoni'" <dmazzoni@google.com>, "'Alexander Surkov'" <
      surkov.alexander@gmail.com>, "'David Bolter'" <dbolter@mozilla.com>,
      "'Cynthia Shelly'" <cyns@microsoft.com>
      Date: 06/18/2015 04:19 PM
      Subject: RE: aria-level a required property for role="heading" or a
      supported property  with an RFC SHOULD for authors




      +1, I have previously suggested that this is the better response
      (holy cow
      James, we're going 2 for 2 :-) ).

      Leonie did some very quick real-time testing during our call, and
      (she will
      correct me if I am wrong) she noted that in Firefox with NVDA (?)
      when the
      level was not specified, it defaulted to "level 2" (which I think is
      a wrong
      decision). Not sure where that decision is happening however, but
      suspect
      it's in the screen reader.

      JF


      > -----Original Message-----
      > From: James Craig [mailto:jcraig@apple.com]
      > Sent: Thursday, June 18, 2015 2:14 PM
      > To: Joseph Scheuhammer
      > Cc: WAI Protocols & Formats; Dominic Mazzoni; Alexander Surkov;
      David
      Bolter;
      > Cynthia Shelly
      > Subject: Re: aria-level a required property for role="heading" or a
      supported
      > property with an RFC SHOULD for authors
      >
      > VoiceOver used to speak "Heading Level 0, text content" but we
      fixed that
      a few
      > years ago. It now speaks "Heading, text content"
      >
      > James
      >
      > > On Jun 18, 2015, at 2:04 PM, Joseph Scheuhammer <
      clown@alum.mit.edu>
      > wrote:
      > >
      > > On 2015-06-18 3:06 PM, Bryan Garaventa wrote:
      > >> 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.
      > >
      > > Tangent:  What do Chrome, FF, IE, and Safari, do, in fact, when
      faced
      with
      > "heading", but no aria-level?  For example,
      > >
      > > <div role="heading>...</div>
      > >
      > > How is the level property mapped?
      > >
      > > --
      > > ;;;;joseph.
      > >
      > > 'Array(16).join("wat" - 1) + " Batman!"'
      > >           - G. Bernhardt -
      > >
      >