Re: False aria-describedby expectations in ARIA Authoring Practices (longdesc)

On Fri, Apr 29, 2011 at 2:24 PM, Henri Sivonen <hsivonen@iki.fi>
wrote:
> Is there no way to connect a "description" semantic to a structured
> subtree in the existing accessibility APIs?

Where possible, that's already required:

http://www.w3.org/WAI/PF/aria-implementation/#mapping_additional_relations

See especially this note:

"Note that aria-describedby may reference structured or interactive
information where users would want to be able to navigate to different
sections of content. User agents MAY provide a way for the user to
navigate to structured information referenced by aria-describedby and
assistive technology SHOULD provide such a method."

Judging from the mapping document, MSAA+UI Express and Apple
Accessibility API do not support a described-by relationship between two
objects in the accessibility tree, and so here the mapping falls back to
filling a string property only.

I don't have the expertise to say whether this correctly reflects
underlying limitations in the APIs. I can't see any non-custom way to
express meta-hierarchical relationships between objects in the Apple
Accessibility API.

--
Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis

Received on Friday, 29 April 2011 14:15:20 UTC