RE: Rethinking the necessities of ARIA landmark role "main" and HTML5 <main> element

While I do understand the argument for believing the role="main" or <main>
element to be redundant I personally do not agree with this argument.

 

In particular I would be interested to know the justification for the
following statement:

 

"For "main" specifically, nothing is needed, since what users want is not to
jump to a specific place in the document but to jump _past_ uninteresting
content in the document."

 

I use a screen reader myself and while I do want to be able to skip over
uninteresting content, I would also like to be able to go directly to what
the author of a site has designated as the main content and suspect I'm not
the only one with this view. 

 

Even if a page is marked up semantically well using the new HTML5 structural
elements or ARIA landmarks, I still might have to hit my screen readers
landmark hotkey several times before I reach the "interesting" content which
is just tedious and time consuming, particularly when visiting an unfamiliar
site.  

 

I do appreciate that in theory it should be possible to determine the main
content by simply removing the "uninteresting" content, but as was suggested
by another member, I feel that this approach is more likely to lead to
problems than simply providing authors with the ability to explicitly
designate the main content. 

 

Obviously whether web authors do this or not or do so in a sensible way is
another matter, but in theory I believe it is better to be able to indicate
main content explicitly than not providing a mechanism for enabling them to
do so at all.

 

Cheers

Ian

 

 

 

  

 

 

 



  _____  

From: Steve Faulkner [mailto:faulkner.steve@gmail.com] 
Sent: 26 March 2013 07:25
To: w3c-wai-ig@w3.org
Cc: Ian Yang; Ian Hickson
Subject: Re: Rethinking the necessities of ARIA landmark role "main" and
HTML5 <main> element


Does Hixie's response make it any clearer to anyone why role=main or the
<main> element is redundant?


If so please explain.

with regards

--
SteveF
HTML  <http://www.w3.org/html/wg/drafts/html/master/> 5.1
 <http://www.paciellogroup.com/resources/wat-ie-about.html> 


On 26 March 2013 05:16, Ian Hickson <ian@hixie.ch> wrote:


On Tue, 26 Mar 2013, Ian Yang wrote:

> On Tue, Mar 26, 2013 at 12:43 PM, Ian Hickson <ian@hixie.ch> wrote:
> >
> > Mark it as such. For example, sidebars using <aside>, navigation
> > blocks using <nav>, footers using <footer>, etc.
>
> I'm sorry, but I don't get it.
>
> Assume there is a user who is not interested in the <header>, <nav> and
> <aside>. How could these markups help the user jump past themselves?


The same way a landmark role would, or the way <h1>s would. The user agent
or accessibility tool would provide a user interface to enable the user to
navigate the document accordingly. For example, it's common for user
agents to allow the user to jump to specific headings by pressing a key
combination, or to skip to the next paragraph (skipping past any content
in the current paragraph) by pressing a key combination. The same is
possible for landmark roles or for skipping past uninteresting sections.


--
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
Things that are impossible just take longer.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'