Re: Making ARIA and native HTML play better together

On 7 May 2015 at 07:06, Dominic Mazzoni <dmazzoni@google.com> wrote:

> 1. I like the label element idea.
>

So do I :-)

>
> 2. For the specific case of adding focusability, one concern is that
> there's no way to revert back to not being focusable at all. Adding
> tabIndex=-1 would leave the element as focusable but not part of the tab
> order. Also, this isn't backwards compatible. This would change the
> semantics and has the potential to break sites.
>
> 3. For changing behavior based on the role, one disadvantage I can see is
> that it potentially makes ARIA more "dangerous" for web developers. I've
> often helped developers make existing sites accessible. It's very
> reassuring that any changes to ARIA attributes won't affect the look and
> feel of the site and won't require testing again in every browser - only
> accessibility needs to be tested again, not everything else. This change
> also isn't backwards compatible. This would change the semantics and has
> the potential to break sites.
>

One possible method to overcome the backwards compat issues would be to
require a boolean atribute to be added to enable the behaviours, for
example 'interactive'

<div role="button" interactive>press me</div>

--

Regards

SteveF
HTML 5.1 <http://www.w3.org/html/wg/drafts/html/master/>