Re: Confusion about role of dialog

Hi James,

> We have noticed that when using a role of dialog JAWS is going into 
> application mode. Is this correct behaviour or a JAWS bug? I see 
> nothing in the spec which states that this should happen.

There is a comment about this in the Authoring Practices, although I 
can't give you a direct url to it.  It's in the section "3.2.7. 
Providing Navigable Structure within Web Pages" [1], specifically the 
sub-section "3.2.7.2. Structural Roles that Facilitate Navigation with 
Assistive Technologies".  Then, it's under point 2 of that sub-section 
-- look for "Dialogs and alert dialogs - special case application 
roles".  That section begins:

> WAI-ARIA provides dialog and alertdialog roles that are to be treated 
> as special case application roles. Like application, screen readers 
> will leave the main job of keyboard navigation up the dialog.

Since this is the authors' guide, I take it that it's assuring authors 
that using dialog and alertdialog roles will be treated as application 
roles *because* they (the authors) will have provided keyboard control 
for those dialogs.  As such authors expect to be in control, and don't 
want their keyboard handlers overridden by an AT.

The question is:  are dialogs like that?  Depends...  I can imagine a 
preferences dialog chock-full of controls wherein keyboard control is 
managed by the dialog.  But, I can also imagine other dialogs that are 
mostly text, with only a few controls.  In fact, that's what 
alertdialogs usually are -- a message with a few buttons to dismiss it.  
In these cases, keyboard control isn't much of an issue for the author.

Perhaps the way to deal with it is if a given dialog has little or no 
author provided keyboard control, to wrap the contents of the dialog 
with a 'document' role.  Would that inform screen readers that it's okay 
to treat this particular dialog as a document?

[1] http://www.w3.org/WAI/PF/aria-practices/Overview.html#kbd_layout

-- 
;;;;joseph

'I had some dreams, they were clowns in my coffee. Clowns in my coffee.'
                      - C. Simon (misheard lyric) -

Received on Tuesday, 1 February 2011 20:55:28 UTC