Re: ARIA and mainstream UI (was RE: ARIA 1.1: Deprecate @aria-grabbed and @aria-dropeffect)


> On Sep 18, 2015, at 19:49, James Craig <jcraig@apple.com> wrote:
>
>
> Quoting the ARIA spec:
> "Aside from using WAI-ARIA markup to improve what is exposed to
> accessibility APIs, user agents behave as they would natively.”

This accords with my understanding of how ARIA was originally conceived as a means of allowing “custom controls” to be made accessible by declaring them to the accessibility APIs, and of adding navigational landmarks that weren’t supported at the time by HTML. I am not persuaded that the scope of ARIA should be expanded beyond its role of providing information to accessibility APIs. If authors choose to use ARIA semantics to determine CSS properties, for instance, then that’s their decision - and a reasonable one to make in many cases. However, it doesn’t affect the user interface implemented by the user agent; it’s just a straightforward use of selectors and CSS styles. I don’t object to such opportunistic uses of ARIA by authors for additional such purposes, provided that the roles, states and properties are nevertheless used correctly and as specified.

My preference has always been for work to be done, where possible, to enhance the features of host languages rather than to define accessibility-specific (including ARIA) attributes.


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Received on Saturday, 19 September 2015 01:14:58 UTC