RE: Couple of questions regarding ARIA

Hello Aaron and all,

Victor Tsaran wrote:
> 1. Why is there no role of SplitButton in ARIA spec?
In Windows a split button is usually used in a toolbar, and isn't focusable.
Thus screen reader users are, as far as I know, not accustomed to reaching a
split button. I suggest handling it by putting both stops in the tab order.
If one of the buttons drops down a menu, put aria-haspopup="true" on that
button to indicate that. This is the only way we could think of doing split
buttons that today's users would understand -- it's "discoverable".

Split buttons are used in many toolbars, Yahoo! toolbar, AOL toolbar, IE
toolbar etc. You can tab to a split button on an IE toolbar in IE7 and the
interaction is as follows:

* DOWN Arrow opens up a context menu.
* SPACE Bar executes a default action.

I am surprised that ARIA spec does not include split buttons since they are
part of the MSAA spec.

> 2. Why is there a difference in naming between roles and states, for 
> example, the ARIA role has a keyword of "role" while ARIA state has a 
> keyword of aria-state etc?
This is really because of the history -- the role attribute was created by
the XHTML 2 working group. However, people still argue that it's special
because it's not just for accessibility. For example it's useful to mark the
navigation, search and main sections of a web page for cell phone usage.

I think this introduces inconsistency, but I guess I can't change the flow
of the history.

> 3. Why does Firefox announce ContextMenu when the menu drops down with 
> both JAWS and Window-eyes?
If you have a testcase, please file a bug in bugzilla and attach it so we
can look. It could be a bug on our part, but I don't know without seeing it
and consulting Marco Zehe, my new QA.

Sure, will do, and soon...

Thanks Aaron,
Victor

Received on Tuesday, 18 December 2007 20:33:38 UTC