Re: Discussion Issues with Landmark ARIA Documentation

caveat: personal opinions from the hip.

On 10 Nov 2008, at 8:06 AM, Thomas Logan wrote:

> I tried implementing ARIA landmarks for codetalks.org to create a  
> real world example.  Here are a few issues for discussion that came  
> up.
>
> 1.       W3C document says landmark contentinfo applies to  
> immediate ancestor whose role is not presentation.   If you take  
> the code talks page this is not valid.  The footer is a child of  
> something called globalWrapper.  The contentinfo is actually  
> related to the node with id=content.  I think it would be more  
> logical and accurate to state that contentinfo corresponds to  
> content that is marked with role=main.  Is there any other scenario  
> where the contentinfo would not be referring to the main content on  
> the page?

Here's an interaction that we hadn't noted.

If there is an @aria-describedby arc pointing at the  
@role='contentinfo' element, then it is about
th source of the @aria-describedby arc.

I do agree it is frequently not the closest ancestor that is not  
@role='presentation'.
But @role='main' is too restrictive IMHO.

For a non-main use case, consider photo credits.  These are to me the  
essence of contentinfo
and apply to a part of the page that may or may not be main content.

> 2.       The Best Practices document says that every region MUST  
> have a label.  I think contentinfo, search and navigation landmarks  
> should only be required to be uniquely identified if there is more  
> than one.  This would be similar to Section 508 1194.22 (i) that  
> requires frames to be titled to facilitate identification and  
> navigation.  If there is only one landmark contentinfo, search, or  
> navigation then it is uniquely labeled and navigable and should not  
> require additional work.

+1 this is sympathetic to how we got the <access> element to apply  
hotkeys by ID or role.

But we could address this in the spec by making "search" the default  
value of @aria-name when @role='search'.


> 3.       The Best Practices document shows setting a div tag with a  
> title attribute to identify the element.   Is this equivalent to  
> providing a header?  Current testing with JAWS does not show  
> support for reading the title attribute of a div.
>
> Code example
> <div role="complementary" title="weather">

This should not be in the Best Practices.  It is a last choice under  
the accessible-name determination algorithm.

Unless there are examples of the other markup patters immediately  
before it so it is illustrating the last
choice method last.

> 4.       The BP document also shows using aria-labelledby on an  
> element to point to the header of a region.  I don’t understand why  
> the header content can’t be required to be the first element under  
> the region.

It is really bad practice to assume you can have first position in  
anything.  It absolutely
breaks independent extension in different aspects.  Don't go there.

*If* we can get the ARIA implementation to take on the additional  
work, it would make a lot
of sense to define implicit aria-labelledby semantics pointing *at*  
an <hN> element.

This is  in effect an rdf:about arc from the <hN> to an enclosing  
scope just as with the
'contentinfo' case discussed above.

Until the implementors are willing to take on the extra work, the  
explicit @aria-labelledby is
the way to go.


> Code example from document
> <p role="main" aria-labelledby="hdr1">
> <div role="header" id="hdr1">
> Top News Stories
> </div>
> </p>
>
> Code example from web today
> <p role=”main”>
> <h2>Top News Stories</h2>
> </p>
>
> Using the existing html markup seems more intuitive.  I’m also not  
> sure why the example in the document uses <p> tag instead of <div>   
> What am I missing?

Look at web today in terms of using <p> vs. <div> for a story nugget  
like this.  We
should do whatever the world in the wild is doing.

Al

> Reference codetalks.org Website
> http://wiki.codetalks.org/wiki/index.php/Main_Page
> Note you must be logged out of the site to use the landmarks.  Only  
> the theme for non logged in users currently has role support
>
> Reference ARIA Best Practices
> http://www.w3.org/WAI/PF/aria-practices/
>

Received on Wednesday, 12 November 2008 18:24:04 UTC