Re: [aapi] live roles

Thanks Joseph,

Some comments inline:

Joseph Scheuhammer wrote:
> David,
>
>> When a user agent is mapping aria roles to platform roles, sometimes
>> there is no good candidate platform role.
> So, the situation is:
> - the markup element itself defines a role.  In your example, it's
> <table>.
> - the role attribute defines a role.  In your example, role="log".
> - there is nothing in the a11y API to map the role attribute value to.
>
> The question is, then:  what to do in terms of publishing a role?
>
> Is that right?

Yes exactly.
>
> In your example, mapping something that is a "log" to a ROLE_TABLE
> seems wrong.  Tables have little if anything in common with a log.  It
> looks as if the <table> element is being used for presentation here,
> in which case it really should be something like <table
> role="presentation> ... <div role="log" ... .
>
Joseph, for a laugh see
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=469688#c9

I agree with you except, as luck would have it, AT based table
navigation does tend to come in handy in strange places. Maybe some
power users can chime in here? We still have this churn where the
experience for our users might best be served in a way that doesn't
cleanly fit our ARIA strategy.

> However, the browser has to deal with the markup it's given. 
> Intuition says look for something in the a11y API that comes close to
> "log"; that is, try to capture the role attribute as best you can. 
> Since, as you note, you are exposing "... expose events and states to
> capture the 'live'-ness", isn't there something that would fit better
> than ROLE_TABLE?
>
> In the end, I guess one would have to fall back on the element itself,
> if nothing better can be found.
>
Yep.
>> I feel aria is pushing platform accessibility ...
>
> Right.  Time to update a11y APIs.  Or, rather, provide a mechanism to
> extend them.
>
(Yeah, or write DOM based ATs like FireVox)

We do have a current extension mechanism in IAccessible2 and atk/at-spi
where we can (and do) expose name value pairs as a string. See for
example:
http://www.linuxfoundation.org/en/Accessibility/IAccessible2/ObjectAttributes

cheers,
David

Received on Wednesday, 4 March 2009 16:54:34 UTC