Re: ARIA mapping of intent

Hi Charles,

On Wed, Feb 1, 2012 at 10:25 AM, Charles Pritchard <chuck@jumis.com> wrote:

> This issue just came up for me: how do we let an AT know ahead of time
> about an Intent which would be triggered by a button? This came up while
> talking to Benjamin about event forwarding from buttons to file input
> fields.
>

Could you elaborate on what the AT would use this for?


> Here's our modern day forwarding, with a non-standard role extension.
>
> <span role="file button" onclick=file.click() />
> <input id=file id=file hidden />
>
>
> That "file" role is not standard. Currently, an AT will just remark that
> it's a button (though it may read the role out).
>
> So, in the long term, everything is really an intent.


I don’t think everything is an intent; I think intents have a certain
granularity which makes some things too fine-grained to be intents (like
navigating a link, or selecting some text.) Intents also imply the
opportunity for parties being “late bound.” A given site might desire that
facility on a case-by-case basis, so similar action that is mediated using
intents on one site might be hard-coded and not use intents on another.

How do we let ATs know that a button is going to trigger a file picker box
> when clicked on? Do we need an intent="mime/mask" attribute added to the
> top level of ARIA?


Would it make sense to use role extensions depending on the given intent?
For example <span role="share button" onclick=…>? Could you point to
examples of sites that have accessible roles for things that you’d probably
implement using intents? Or is there something special about the intent
itself? My gut feeling is that, from the user’s point of view, saying “this
button is connected to an intent” is like saying “this button does
something using AJAX.” It is kind of an implementation detail.

Dominic