Re: Agenda: August 27, 2015 WAI-PF ARIA Caucus (Correction I am still chairing this week)

James,

What the group is trying to do is deliver consistency across browsers. All
the other browsers, except Safari, are consistent. This is a cleanup
exercise.

Do we see a lot of use of this? No.

However, the fact that the HTML working group decided to make every element
accept a tabindex and rowgroup can receive focus we had to address the gap
in the browsers.

Do we think this will happen a lot? No.

There needs to be some degree of predictability in the browser
implementation. Should, for whatever reason, an author put tabindex on this
useless element the user will receive a very confusing user experience that
only impacts the user of the assistive technology as the user who is not
impaired will see physical showed in the UI around the rowgroup.

Asking the group to waste cycles finding a real world example where this
element is used is a waste of people's time for something we just want to
protect the user against in case it happens. The right thing would be to
NOT have rowgroup receive a tabindex at all but the browser vendors decided
differently. There was NO real world need for it to receive tabindex.

Rich


Rich Schwerdtfeger



From:	James Craig <jcraig@apple.com>
To:	Joseph Scheuhammer <clown@alum.mit.edu>
Cc:	PF <public-pfwg@w3.org>
Date:	08/31/2015 03:39 PM
Subject:	Re: Agenda: August 27, 2015 WAI-PF ARIA Caucus (Correction I am
            still chairing this week)



Is there a real-world use case that does this? It seems like a pretty
complicated example to discuss as a theoretical problem.

For example, what's the real-world need to focus a row group?

James


> On Aug 26, 2015, at 9:02 AM, Joseph Scheuhammer <clown@alum.mit.edu>
wrote:
>
> Hi James,
>
> On 2015-08-25 12:40 PM, Richard Schwerdtfeger wrote:
>>
>> *Agenda: August 27, 2015 WAI-PF ARIA Caucus*
>> ...
>>
>>    6. Action 1578 Discuss Issue 700 with the Working group (Should
>>    rowgroup, tbody, and thead have any role mapping in AAPIs? should
>>    there be an accessible object?
>>    or, should it be a generic object? (Rich)
>>      o I believe we discussed this and we made the "group" role the
>>        generic role. This would be consistent with IE and Safari
>>        mappings. Shouldn't this be closed?
>>      o _https://www.w3.org/WAI/PF/Group/track/issues/700_
>>      o _https://www.w3.org/WAI/PF/Group/track/actions/1578_
>>
>
>
> Rich notes above, "I believe we discussed this and we made the 'group'
role the generic role".  I can confirm that the AAPI group decided to
change the mappings for role="rowgroup" to a generic group-like role for
the various platforms [1].  The reason is that authors can create a grid
with rowgroup elements that are focusable and interactive (e.g., respond to
clicks) [2].
>
> However, the statement, "This would be consistent with IE and Safari
mappings" is not correct with respect to Safari.  The current AXAPI mapping
for rowgroup is "Not mapped".  There is a webkit bug in this regard [3].
What is the current thinking regarding AXAPI's mapping of the rowgroup
role?
>
> Thanks.
>
> [1] http://w3c.github.io/aria/core-aam/core-aam.html#role-map-rowgroup
> [2] http://clown.idrc.ocad.ca/Fluid/aria/FocusableRowGroup.html
> [3] https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=146239
>
> --
> ;;;;joseph.
>
> 'Array(16).join("wat" - 1) + " Batman!"'
>           - G. Bernhardt -
>