exposing new roles to platform

• From: David Bolter <david.bolter@gmail.com>
• Date: Sun, 13 Dec 2009 20:46:04 -0500
• To: "wai-xtech@w3.org" <wai-xtech@w3.org>
• Message-ID: <4B2598DC.7090802@gmail.com>

In dealing with web content browsers need to expose roles that do not 
have reasonable match/mapping on the desktop. When exposing such roles 
in MSAA, Firefox has adopted the technique of returning a string instead 
of an enumerated value; which is possible because get_accRole has an 
in/out VARIANT type. I think IE exposes such roles in the 
get_accDescription.

I'm biased and like the way Firefox does it because it allows AT to 
always call get_accRole to discover the role, and leaves 
get_accDescription free for such things as aria-describedby etc.

Thoughts?

Note this isn't an issue for more modern desktop API (ATK, IAccessible2, 
UIA etc).

cheers,
David

Received on Monday, 14 December 2009 01:46:40 UTC