- From: John Foliot <jfoliot@stanford.edu>
- Date: Wed, 21 Oct 2009 16:23:20 -0700 (PDT)
- To: "'HTMLWG WG'" <public-html@w3.org>
- Cc: "'W3C WAI-XTECH'" <wai-xtech@w3.org>
Thoughts on this thread: Thomas Broyer wrote: > > The fact that the developer can technically turn an <a> into a button > isn't a justification for making it conforming. If it's not a link but > a button, you should use <button> or <span role=button>. > The fact that we are seeing this in the wild, and that non-conformant pages still render in all browsers (and will continue to do so) is justification enough that ARIA added here should not 'add' to the non-conformance. ARIA is an attempt to provide real solutions to real problems, and if a developer can turn an <a> into a button and have it render on screen, that is a real problem. Maciej Stachowiak wrote: > > ... a funky custom role > on <h1>. But it does seem fairly common to use an <a> element with > styling and a click event listener or javascript: URL as a button, > instead of as a link. Is it worthwhile for the spec to tell people > doing such things that they are wrong? 1) ARIA is no more 'funky' than microdata - and in fact is much more mature. Bad choice of description. 2) Having the spec introduce or take advantage of a teachable moment is good 3) Why *can't* any element take an ARIA role if it is appropriate? Given the desire to have as much accessibility baked in as possible, this seems like a trivial thing to add to the spec - any element can take an ARIA role if/when required. Why limit it to a subset of the entire tool-box? Henri Sivonen wrote: > > Styling h1 to be a button probably isn't a cowpath. > Right, but it *is* a potential out-lyer, and more importantly, what *harm* is inflicted by allowing the <h_> element to take an ARIA role? Ian Hickson wrote: > > Conformance is about what developers _should_ do, however. > There is however no real penalty for non-conformance, so that really doesn't mean a whole bunch in the grand scheme of things. If however you truly believe that conformance is "...what developers _should_ do...", then they _should_ add ARIA role information to any element that they have 'repurposed' via scripting and CSS, to, as Steven states "Make sense out of non-sense" for users of AT. And to do this 'legally' the spec must say they can... JF
Received on Wednesday, 21 October 2009 23:23:59 UTC