Re: ACTION-1711: Get with Alex Surkov to discuss name from content removal from listitems

Hi Alex,

I have an action for this coming Thu ARIA meeting to ask your opinion on 
dropping the accessible name requirement from the listitem role.  Here's 
a summary of where we are at.

1. List items (role="listitem") are text containers that must appear 
within the context of a list (role="list") or a group (role="group"). [1]
2. List items are not interactive or widget like. [2]
3. Currently, list items require an accessible name, meaning browsers 
must compute a name for all list items. [1]
4. Currently, name-from-content is allowed as one way to compute the 
name. [1]

After a number of discussions and emails, we have come to conclusion 
that the name requirement is not needed, and the name-from-contents is 
sometimes detrimental.

Since listitems are not widget like, they are similar to other text 
containers such as paragraphs.  They are just containers of structured 
text.  Paragraphs do not require a name, so why should list items?

Also, when combined with the name-from-contents, requiring an accessible 
name can result in very long name if the author has not provided a name, 
depending on the contents of the list item.

The conclusion we have come to is to remove 3 and 4 above from the 
definition of the listitem role [1].  Accessible name is no longer 
required, which implies that name-from-contents is no longer needed.

However, before we finalize this, we wanted your opinion on the matter.

Thanks.

[1] http://w3c.github.io/aria/aria/aria.html#listitem
[2] http://w3c.github.io/aria/aria/aria.html#list

-- 
;;;;joseph.

'Array(16).join("wat" - 1) + " Batman!"'
            - G. Bernhardt -

Received on Tuesday, 1 September 2015 15:06:31 UTC