Re: Concern with prose in @aria-errormessage

On Fri, Sep 11, 2015 at 12:58 AM, James Craig <jcraig@apple.com> wrote:

> http://rawgit.com/w3c/aria/master/aria/aria.html#aria-errormessage
>
> I'm concerned this line in @aria-errormessage is going to result in
> duplicated announcements. Reconciling these two different types of
> user-facing announcements would be very challenging from an implementation
> perspective.
>
> Authors may use live regions for the error message element
> <http://rawgit.com/w3c/aria/master/aria/aria.html#dfn-element> applying
> either an aria-live
> <http://rawgit.com/w3c/aria/master/aria/aria.html#aria-live> property or
> using one of the live region roles
> <http://rawgit.com/w3c/aria/master/aria/aria.html#live_region_roles>, for
> example, alert <http://rawgit.com/w3c/aria/master/aria/aria.html#alert>.
>
>
> Please change it to recommend one or the other (either @aria-errormessage
> or live regions) but not both simultaneously.
>

I understand your concern, but I'm afraid that this would hinder adoption
of aria-errormessage because of backwards compatibility. If I have a highly
accessible web form right now and I switch from using role=alert for error
messages (in addition to aria-invalid, of course) to aria-errormessage,
that would be a regression for any users who aren't using a supported
browser/AT combination.

While I realize it's an implementation challenge, I'd lean towards allowing
the target of aria-errormessage to point to a live region (or alert), and
put the burden on AT to keep track of this and detect it as part of support
for aria-errormessage.