Re: proliferation of reference roles in the dpub aria spec.

That is not the issue and it has absolutely nothing to do with the problem
we are trying to solve which is that given a link we need to know what the
destination type of the link it is going. This was discussed at the last
ARIA task force meeting. It is important that people read the work going on
in the cognitive accessibility task force and what is being done with dpub.

Coga needs to know that that link points to help information and a whole
list of other features such that when styled they know the purpose of the
destination of the link so it can be styled using symbols or other
mechanisms so that they can appear in a consistent way. This impacts aging,
in that many web sites and applications style things differently and the
user gets lost. The dpub group had introduced different roles for things
like glossary references that could easily marked with role="link" and
aria-destination="glossaryterm". A publisher could style these to look the
same way and in a way that is easily understood by different users.

Coga has suggested the use of an new aria-destination attribute that could
consume these values. This would allow us to still reuse the link role for
these different types of links but then provide additional information that
would help drive toward a consistent look and feel. @rel would be great but
unfortunately HTML shoved a bunch of totally unrelated values in it.

This would be for the link role and not the <link> element. The user
experience could care less if the @rel="prefetch". @rel is a hodge podge of
unrelated values.

Charles had earlier asked how ATs processed @rel. On Windows, at least,
they don't and that may be because many of the values have no value to ATs.

Making matters worse SVG2 doesn't even have a rel attribute:
https://svgwg.org/svg2-draft/attindex.html   So, I was interested in @rel
as well but the solution quickly felt apart for our purposes.

I have not seen the SVG WG indicate that it will adopt the HTML <a>

In studies with the aging population with NIDDR and in the Coga task force
that senior users want the user interface to be consistent in how it looks
and where things are placed. For example, they don't want the next link to
appear in
different places as they just can't process the site. They get confused.

Consequently, we are talking about an aria-destination attribute. I have
cc'd Lisa Seeman if you have any questions from the Coga task force.

Rich

Rich Schwerdtfeger



From:	James Craig <jcraig@apple.com>
To:	Richard Schwerdtfeger/Austin/IBM@IBMUS
Cc:	Chaals McCathie Nevile <chaals@yandex-team.ru>, Ivan Herman
            <ivan@w3.org>, W3C PF - DPUB Joint Task Force
            <public-dpub-aria@w3.org>, PF <public-pfwg@w3.org>
Date:	10/09/2015 09:48 AM
Subject:	Re: proliferation of reference roles in the dpub aria spec.
Sent by:	jcraig@apple.com




> On Oct 9, 2015, at 6:31 AM, Richard Schwerdtfeger <schwer@us.ibm.com>
wrote:
>
> Why would a cognitively impaired user care that [@rel] maps to a
stylesheet?

:-)

This is how you associate style sheets to the current HTML page.

<link rel="stylesheet" href="screen.css">