aria-current concerns from Apple

Forwarding some concerns on @aria-current from some of the engineers working on implementation. Note: that the "indicatortype" name was my suggestion, but we're definitely not married to the name. It's also possible the aria-current implementation would be strong enough as just an IDREF pointer without supporting the new token types.


Comments from Apple Accessibility Engineering:

> We have a concern with the aria-current proposal in its current form. 
> 
> From an implementation perspective, the specification makes it difficult to do things like announcing the current element in a list when you first navigate to the beginning of that list. This is because aria-current is only exposed on the object that is current, rather than the containing element. A deep traversal is possible, but computationally expensive on initial rendering and when maintaining the model as descendant elements change.
> 
> The current modal can also lead to author errors if aria-current is modified on all other objects when choosing a new aria-current. For example, what is the expectation when a list has two elements that both claim to be "current"?
> 
> New proposal:
> 
> aria-indicatortype="TOKEN( page | date | ... )" on the leaf element.
> 	remains the token based list of options
> 
> aria-current="IDREF" on the container element
> 	its value should be the ID of the object that is current, which must be a descendant of the container.
> 
> Thanks for considering.

Received on Friday, 11 September 2015 07:22:54 UTC