RE: Couple of questions regarding ARIA

Hi Victor,

SAP also has SplitButtons in its GUIs. We do call them "ButtonChoice" or
"ConfigButton" (yes we do have two names for it :) because the default
action is configurable ..

So SplitButton would be kind of a specialized/derivated button. We know
that ARIA 1.0 has currently no concept for role extensions.
>From the MSAA Role Mapping in Firefox 3 we have to live with the
role=button -> ROLE_SYSTEM_PUSHBUTTON mapping that was built in.
Currently we have to use describedBy keyword to identify the special
kind of element to the users and haspopup to indicate that the element
has an associated popup menu. This has been already discussed and is
considered as a temporary workaround by the working group and will be
hopefully changed in ARIA 2.0 by having a special role here.

Thing that puzzles me is that at the very end this element is in
principle nothing but a clickable combo box decorated as a button ..
But I hesitate to sell it to the public as such :)

Best Regards
Stefan


Dr. Stefan Schnabel 
Accessibility Expert
SAP User Experience Accessibility

SAP AG 
Dietmar-Hopp-Allee 16, 69190 Walldorf, Germany
T: +49 (6227) 7-65652
F: +49 (6227) 78-29877

mailto:stefan.schnabel@sap.com
www.sap.com


-----Original Message-----
From: wai-xtech-request@w3.org [mailto:wai-xtech-request@w3.org] On
Behalf Of Victor Tsaran
Sent: Dienstag, 18. Dezember 2007 21:33
To: wai-xtech@w3.org
Subject: 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 Wednesday, 19 December 2007 08:47:10 UTC