Accessible Rich Internet Applications (WAI-ARIA) draft comments

Is eveyone happy for the following notes to be passed to PFWG? Is
there anything anyone would like to add?

Ian.

--

EOWG discussed http://www.w3.org/TR/2010/WD-wai-aria-20100916/complete
in our Oct 22nd conference call
(http://www.w3.org/2010/10/22-eo-minutes.html), here are our comments.

# Accessible Rich Internet Applications (WAI-ARIA) 1.0

## WAI-ARIA abbreviation

We note that throughout the document the title attribute for the
abbreviation WAI-ARIA is 'Accessible Rich Internet Applications',
ignoring 'WAI'. Is there a good reason for this?
We also felt that in places marking up WAI-ARIA as an abbreviation in
every instance was causing a great deal of visual clutter, the last
paragraph of 1.1 is a good example of this where the term is used 7
times.

Solution:
    * Fully expand WAI-ARIA in <abbr/> title attributes.
    * Remove visual styling of <abbr/> elements when used multiple
times in one section, leaving the first instance in each visually
section recognisable as an abbreviation.

## Link to "WAI-ARIA Overview"

In 1. Introduction, please change from
http://www.w3.org/WAI/intro/aria/ to http://www.w3.org/WAI/intro/aria

## Make 'role' definition more understandable in isolation

We felt that the definition of 'role' at
http://www.w3.org/TR/2010/WD-wai-aria-20100916/terms#def_role, which
is linked to from 1. Introduction, is not clear enough to be of use at
this point in the document. If the reader needs to refer to the
definition of role it is unlike that the current definition would help
them.

## 'non-disabled user' reference

In 1.1. Rich Internet Application Accessibility, paragraph 3, there is
the following text: 'To a non-disabled user, it may look and act like
a collapsible tree widget...'. We feel that this is not appropriate as
it suggests that all disabled people are visually impaired who require
WAI-ARIA to deal with widgets that have their used described visually.
We would prefer the following to replace this sentence: 'To a person
using a visual browser it may look and act like a collapsible tree
widget, but without appropriate semantics, the tree widget may not be
perceivable to or operable by a person using a screen reader or other
assistive technology that does not recognize the role.'


## Longer description required for figures

Figures such as Figure 1 in 1.1. Rich Internet Application
Accessibility are introduced with explanatory text in the preceding
paragraph, but this text does not fully describe the image, for
example it lacks the list of the Accessibility APIs which is contained
in the image. This content needs to be available in text form within
this document.

## h1 vs div

In 1.4. Co-Evolution of WAI-ARIA and Host Languages, paragraph 2 there
is the sentence 'For example, it's better to use an h1 element in HTML
than to use the heading role on a div element.'. We would like this to
be more strongly worded in favour of using the semantic h1. The
document as a whole makes it clear that WAI-ARIA is not a replacement
for semantic markup, but we felt this was a bit ambiguous.

## Assistive technologies examples

For 4. Important Terms we would like to give further input on the AT
section based on documents EO is currently writing. Additionally we
would like a link to 'How PWD use the web' when it is completed.

## Host Language Semantics

We felt that the last two sentences of 7.5. Conflicts with Host
Language Semantics made this section less clear, is this level of
detail required in this document?

## Document focus

Was any consideration given to moving some of the user agent focussed
content to a separate document and limiting this to only the
information developers will require? While well written it is a very
large and information dense document, and we feel that this separation
may make it more accessible to the target audience.

## Style consistency

We've noticed some variations in the styles used in WAI documents, for
example different colours used for visited links. Is there a single
style that all documents should use?

Received on Wednesday, 27 October 2010 12:15:00 UTC