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

John, your response is restating what was already discussed in the minutes.
We agreed to not do that. The demonstrable cases occurred because people
were trying to keep a consistent heading level for an entire rich web
application when applets from different parties were pulled in and you had
to guess to re-write over it.  If you effectively used landmarks I don't
see that being an issue.

All IBM content must reside within a landmark. We found that taking this
approach dramatically increased the usability of all IBM RIAs. It allows
you to effectively find all your content as nothing is orphaned and it
restricts heading navigation to the context to which they were originally
designed. Freedom Scientific tells end users to start your navigation with
landmarks incidentally. Using this approach you pull up a table of contents
(landmark navigation) and you are off to the races. You can skip content
you don't care about.

We have found that making your page depend solely on heading navigation is
a non-starter and makes the headings issue that James Nurthen talked about
a very real problem which would mandate making it a SHOULD because frankly
you just don't know what level to give it at times as you are trying to
absorb an app, with heading navigation designed autonomously, in the middle
of a page that was also built autonomously.

Rich

Rich Schwerdtfeger



From: "John Foliot" <john.foliot@deque.com>
To: Richard Schwerdtfeger/Austin/IBM@IBMUS
Cc: "'Joseph Scheuhammer'" <clown@alum.mit.edu>, "'Cynthia Shelly'"
            <cyns@microsoft.com>, "'David Bolter'" <dbolter@mozilla.com>,
            "'Dominic Mazzoni'" <dmazzoni@google.com>, "'James Craig'"
            <jcraig@apple.com>, "'WAI Protocols & Formats'"
            <public-pfwg@w3.org>, "'Alexander Surkov'"
            <surkov.alexander@gmail.com>
Date: 06/18/2015 04:36 PM
Subject: RE: aria-level a required property for role="heading" or a
            supported property  with an RFC SHOULD for authors



Right, which again leads me to believe that this ‘error’ is not critical –
it can be recovered from and still deliver usable and useful information to
the end user.

This is why I am suggesting SHOULD language contextually: “Authors SHOULD
provide a value for aria-level” (but not “Authors MUST provide a value for
aria-level”) – we have demonstrable use-cases where that kind of stance
might actually introduce as many issues as it may resolve.

JF

From: Richard Schwerdtfeger [mailto:schwer@us.ibm.com]
Sent: Thursday, June 18, 2015 2:30 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

Inactive hide details for "John Foliot" ---06/18/2015 04:19:55 PM---+1, I
have previously suggested that this is the better res"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 -
> >
>