Re: aria-current concerns from Apple

I think the browser may do the appropriate accessibility API for existing
aria-current, you don't have to change ARIA for that. The browser can cache
which element is aria-current, associate it with its container and update
that whenever @aria-current attribute is changed.

On Mon, Sep 14, 2015 at 12:33 PM, White, Jason J <jjwhite@ets.org> wrote:

>
> > On Sep 14, 2015, at 12:22, Alexander Surkov <surkov.alexander@gmail.com>
> wrote:
> >
> > Does the concern come from assistive technology developers?
>
> Apparently, the concern comes from Apple’s UA and AT developers.
>
> To reiterate, the concern is that in order to inform the user which item
> in a list is current when the user navigates to the beginning of the list,
> the ARIA draft requires an expensive tree traversal operation. The proposal
> is that aria-current should be an idref on the container element, enabling
> the node which is current to be identified quickly from the container
> element.
>
> I think the appropriate accessibility API mapping would be to expose it on
> the container element and also on the descendant element to which the idref
> refers (if the proposal is adopted).
>
> > On Fri, Sep 11, 2015 at 3:22 AM, James Craig <jcraig@apple.com> wrote:
> > 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.
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
>
>
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