RE: Tree sample code

Comments inline…

From: Aaron M Leventhal [mailto:aleventh@us.ibm.com]
Sent: Saturday, September 06, 2008 3:42 AM
To: Cynthia Shelly
Cc: George Young; wai-xtech@w3.org; wai-xtech-request@w3.org
Subject: RE: Tree sample code


The graceful degredation might work if you put role="presentation" in the right places. Let's work together on that.
Yes, please.  I’d like for this to be able to work.

In general need to "circle the wagons" on ARIA implementations so that the same things work in both IE and Firefox.
Can we all agree to try out our ideas in each other's implementations or at least make sure the ARIA user agent implementor's guide reflects the algorithm you will use when exposing the positional info to the AT.
Yes, that seems reasonable.

If you can read between the lines, I'm honestly just worried that we're all doing different things without checking with each other and trying it out with the currently shipping implementations that already work, or even checking it against the ARIA spec or implementors guide. If everyone structures their test widgets slightly differently, any 2 implementations will work differently. Authors will end up with a mess. IOW please just take this as me hoping we can go back and forth until we agree to do trees the same way, not to mention menubars, combo boxes and other complex composite widgets with potential structural choices.
Totally agree.  I remember 1997, and I don’t want to go back there ☺

- Aaron

From:

Cynthia Shelly <cyns@exchange.microsoft.com>

To:

Aaron M Leventhal/Cambridge/IBM@IBMUS

Cc:

George Young <gcyoung@microsoft.com>, "wai-xtech@w3.org" <wai-xtech@w3.org>

Date:

09/06/2008 12:52 AM

Subject:

RE: Tree sample code


________________________________



#1 is probably just do to our inexperience.  If it’s not needed, that’s great.

So, #2 is the point of this code sample.  Use the native semantics as far as they go, and then progressively enhance with ARIA.  I feel pretty strongly that this type of graceful degradation pattern should be supported if we want accessibility in the broadest range of user agents.

As a side note, I am getting position and nesting info with IE 8 Beta 2 and JAWS 9.0.2169 with the virtual cursor turned off, and I’m also seeing it in MSAA description field in Inspect32.  The child count is incorrect, and I haven’t yet figured out why.


From: Aaron M Leventhal [mailto:aleventh@us.ibm.com]
Sent: Tuesday, September 02, 2008 5:56 AM
To: Cynthia Shelly
Cc: George Young; wai-xtech@w3.org
Subject: Re: Tree sample code


Here are my comments on Microsoft's tree sample:

1. It uses aria-level, aria-setsize and aria-posinset when it doesn't need to.
The idea is that authors only need to do that if the tree is not DOM complete -- iow it's loaded dynamically. When the entire tree structure is there the user agent is supposed to calculate that info from the structure.

2. It uses <li><a/></li> constructs.
This seems to be to allow for graceful degredation for non-ARIA clients. However, it means that the tree has list, list item and tree item objects mixed together, and no longer looks like a tree widget to current generation ATs. Neither current ATs nor Firefox 3 will process the structure and automatically provide info like the level, posinset and setsize.
In general, the current implementors guide algorithm will not work with this tree. So either the tree needs to change, or the impl guide algorithm or both.

What do you suggest?

- Aaron
From:

Cynthia Shelly <cyns@exchange.microsoft.com>

To:

"wai-xtech@w3.org" <wai-xtech@w3.org>

Cc:

George Young <gcyoung@microsoft.com>

Date:

07/07/2008 11:21 PM

Subject:

Tree sample code




________________________________




As promised, here is a zip of the tree sample I demo’d at the face to face.

Tree.htm uses only nested unordered lists of links (with onclick handlers) to achieve tree behavior.  JAWS in virtual cursor mode with medium verbosity does a good job of reading the list levels.  Tab+enter opens and closes the tree levels.

Ariatree.htm is the same tree, with aria markup added to the links.  With virtual cursor turned off, list level information is exposed to MSAA.  This was tested with IE8 beta 1 and JAWS 9.  There are a few bugs in what is exposed to MSAA by IE in this early build, which will be fixed.

I’ve copied George Young, who wrote the original tree, to which I added ARIA for the CSUN demo.  George is the best person to work with on combining this tree with any other samples that have more extensive keyboard handling features.[attachment "trees.zip" deleted by Aaron M Leventhal/Cambridge/IBM]