Re: ARIA Proposal

I cannot support aria-role over role:

I was one of the original creators for role. Role was started in the xhtml2
working group. It's purpose is not limited to accessibility. Choosing to
limit to accessibility alone will create problems throughout the W3C.

One use case that is not accessibility related: role can take a value of
"main" which eludes to main content. A cell phone provider can take all
main content and move it to the first screen when rendering a web page.
This is not accessibility related. It is also being used, in general, for
content adaptation.

We cannot hijack the role attribute for accessibility purposes alone due to
it's intended scope. As for the aria attributes using the aria- preamble I
have no problem as these have only been used for accessibility. Ian's
proposal for the attributes was excellent.

Google also is against adding unneeded characters which would increase the
download size. All the major search engine providers are counting every
character.

Also, a number of groups are already implementing ARIA which use role:
Dojo, Yahoo, Google, SAS, SAP, lots of others.

Rich,



Rich Schwerdtfeger
Distinguished Engineer, SWG Accessibility Architect/Strategist
Chair, IBM Accessibility Architecture Review  Board
blog: http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/blogs/page/schwer


                                                                           
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                                       Re: ARIA Proposal                   
                                                                           
                                                                           
                                                                           
                                                                           
                                                                           
                                                                           





   With regard to the |role| attribute, I suggest you replace it with an
attribute named "aria-role" for the following reasons:

1) It maintains consistency with your aria-/attribute/ nomenclature.

2) You don't have to modify the parsing of the |role| attribute to treat
ARIA elements as if they were in the XHTML namespace. Instead, you have
a separate attribute that only takes the roles defined in the WAI-ARIA
Roles spec.

3) People who use |role| aren't confused by the lack of a namespace for
ARIA roles and have a clear understanding that the roles are ARIA-related.

4) Even with ARIA roles placed directly in the XHTML namespace, the only
other unnamespaced roles the the |role| attribute can take are the nine
defined in the XML Role Attribute spec, and many of those conflict with
proposed elements in HTML5. Thus, to justify the existence of the |role|
attribute in HTML, you need ARIA. The opposite, however, is not the case.

   Here's an example of how the new attribute would be used:

| <div aria-role="checkbox" aria-checked="true"></div>

   Also, I suggest we allow the new |aria-role| attribute to take only a
single ARIA role as a value. The WAI-ARIA Role spec doesn't really
define how to deal with the use of multiple ARIA roles simultaneously,
nor does it give an example of such. Having a single value makes it
easier to parse, easier for authors to read and write, and takes up less
space in the HTML5 specification.