RE: aria-interactive and the authoring/debug process problems

Dominic,

So your saying is that using aria-interactive would not change the effective role for a widget role, only that there is some, hopefully discoverable, interactive behavior associated with this element, where as part of the current proposal is aria-interactive=false would change GRID/GRIDCELL roles to TABLE/TD.

aria-interactive seems like it could have a lot of different meanings and effects, so how will all these meanings be defined and explained?

Is it better to overload a single attribute with a lot of different features or to have more refined roles and attributes that better describe the type of interaction or function of the content?

Jon

From: Dominic Mazzoni [mailto:dmazzoni@google.com]
Sent: Tuesday, May 19, 2015 2:11 PM
To: Matthew King
Cc: Alexander Surkov; Gunderson, Jon R; W3C WAI Protocols & Formats
Subject: Re: aria-interactive and the authoring/debug process problems

I'm happy to see this initial work on aria-interactive!

On Thu, May 14, 2015 at 2:29 PM, Matthew King <mattking@us.ibm.com<mailto:mattking@us.ibm.com>> wrote:
Initially, aria-interactive can only be set on grid, treegrid, list, and directory.

I think we should allow it on every role, e.g. widget roles like button, checkbox, link, etc. but even other roles like heading, etc.

The use-case I have in mind is for editing-type applications.

Consider a form editor, i.e. an application that lets you create web forms. When the form is in "editing" mode, you might want to focus a control you're interested in, then press Backspace to delete the form from the page, or up/down arrows to rearrange where that control is in the order. Pressing Enter might let you edit the control's name.

A similar example is for slide editors like Google Presentations or Prezi where you've got a slide composed of a bunch of objects. The heading at the top of the slide deserves a role of heading, and when viewing slides that's what it should get. But what about in editing mode? It doesn't make sense to just always make it a text box - it should be a heading with aria-interactive=true, then you can activate it to edit its text, or instead press Backspace to delete it, arrow keys to move it around the slide, and so on.