Re: SUGGESTIONS ON LABELLEDBY

Look at it this way:
If the index to a book contained only:
Chapter: Horses
Chapter: Dogs
Chapter: Birds

Would that be useful or would
Chapter 1: Horses
Chapter 2: Dogs
Chapter 3: Birds
be more useful?

One could say go to chapter 3 or in chapter 3  there is bla bla bla.
Likewise, if one navigated by landmark roles  and the role had the same name as the text in an h<n> tag at the start of that landmark region, then what value is the author really adding?
Headings properly marked up expose structure and most screen reader users (Webaim survey) rely on heading navigation a lot.
One uses landmark navigation for a completely different reason. The landmarks are a generic structure and one will find a role=main / search /etc. on any page but Horses for sale' will be specific to a Web page and is already being exposed by the h<n> tag in the example that triggered my first comment 2 days ago.
So if the section or article element used an aria-label= 1 / 2 / 3 or some similar label, the user might be able to determine there are n sections under the heading 'Horses for sale' for instance. And that might be useful. 
If the landmark role and h<n> tag is exposing the same stuff  then the developer will do himself a service by cutting the code and spare users too from repetitive content.
Regardless of which navigation technique I used, if I heard the same stuff, I'll simply stop using one of them.
And it will not be h-navigation.
> simple use case is where a heading has been used within a widget, that adequately describes the function of the widget.
So what you call a used case maybe one but one that real users will seldom find useful and simply wonder why does this thing repeat stuff all over the place.
That is one of the underlying theme for WCAG 2' HTML H2 technique: avoid duplication. 
Thanks and regards,
Sailesh Panchang

--- On Wed, 1/23/13, Joshue O Connor <joshue.oconnor@cfit.ie> wrote:


From: Joshue O Connor <joshue.oconnor@cfit.ie>
Subject: Re: SUGGESTIONS ON LABELLEDBY
To: "Sailesh Panchang" <spanchang02@yahoo.com>
Cc: "'WCAG'" <w3c-wai-gl@w3.org>, "w3c-wai-pf@w3.org" <w3c-wai-pf@w3.org>
Date: Wednesday, January 23, 2013, 4:05 PM


Sailesh Panchang wrote:
> I look at this code and wonder what one is trying to accomplish:
> Use ARIA for the sake of using it?
> Heading tags expose structure and one can use them  suitably to do so.
> If the regions marked by aria roles has the  same labels as the content of an h-tag, what is one accomplishing?
> These are useless for sighted users anyway.
> For assistive technology users (mainly vision impaired ones) this is plain duplication.
> It is more useful if the label text described what  one sees visually but is not available by other markup, like
> <ul role="navigation" aria-label="secondary">
> So when one tells me go to the secondary navigation or main navigation, I know what they refer to.
> If someone were to say go to the 'Horses on Sale' or 'Mares' sections, I can do so easily using h-navigation.
> The code sample below  is unnecessary code I think.

Thanks for the feedback. OTTOMH, A simple use case is where a heading has been used within a widget, that adequately describes the function of the widget. Therefore the user has both a possible landmark labelled with aria-labelledby if there is an existing heading, as well as the heading itself. It's a valid usecase to my mind.

Cheers

Josh

Received on Friday, 25 January 2013 14:18:22 UTC