Re: suggestions for new roles and properties in ARIA next

James Craig, Tue, 19 Apr 2011 19:19:07 -0700:
> I second your nomination of the text and disclosure roles, but have a 
> few comments and questions inline.

> On Apr 19, 2011, at 1:29 PM, Steve Faulkner wrote:
> 
>> a few suggestions for ARIA next
>> 
>> role="text"
>> when a non text object has a role of text , its to be treated as text.
>> example use:
>> 
>> My <img src="heart.png" alt="heart" role="text"> breaks.
> 
> Seconded, but this example would probably need aria-label, because 
> overriding the img role means the alt attribute is now meaningless. 
> Agreed?

I don't see why @alt then is meaningless. It would be meaningless if 
@alt cannot be used when the IMG has role=text. It would be a huge 
disappointment if role=text means one cannot use @alt ...

Btw, when an <img> is the sole content of a link, then VoiceOver treats 
it more or less as if it has role=text. (Because, in that case, the 
fact that it is an image, isn't announced by VoiceOver - only its alt 
text is read aloud, as link text.

>> aria-description="text"
>> 
>> like aria-label except it maps to the acc description in accessibility APIs
>> 
>> provides a means of including an extended text description internal to
>> an element , could be used in place of table summary attribute. for
>> images when an accessible name is not provided but a description is.
> 
> Kind of seems like you're stretching description to support the 
> semantics of @summary and maybe @longdesc. What makes you certain 
> this necessary?

Disregarding @longdesc etc: if both aria-describedby and 
aria-labelledby are needed, then it sounds logical that both aria-label 
and aria-description is needed too.

>> role="caption"
>> identifies text inside an element as a caption for an associated
>> object such as a table or image
> 
> Associated how? aria-describedby? aria-labelledby? If so, why is the 
> role necessary? This reminds me of the label role that was previously 
> removed from ARIA.
> 
>> provides a role for HTML elements such as table <caption> and figure
>> <figcaption>

I agree that this would be very nice, Steve. That way <caption> could 
default to role=caption, I suppose. And ditto for <figcaption>. That 
way we don't *have* to use aria-labelledby for things that should be 
clear from the associations of the markup itself.
-- 
leif halvard silli

Received on Wednesday, 20 April 2011 06:21:01 UTC