Re: Comment on ARIA 1.0: Problematic conformance requirement for aria-hidden

My 2 cents.

The client-side separation of content and presentation is absolutely
fundamental to the accessibility of the web platform:

 http://www.w3.org/TR/2004/REC-webarch-20041215/#pci
 
 http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG/#content-structure-separation
 
 http://www.w3.org/TR/UAAG20/#gl-style-sheets-config

That CSS expresses presentation not content is absolutely fundamental
to the design of CSS:

 http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS2/#abstract
 
 http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS2/intro.html#design-principles

That CSS is used to express the presentation of HTML documents, not
the content of HTML documents, is absolutely fundamental to the
application of CSS to HTML:

    http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/present/styles.html

    http://dev.w3.org/html5/spec/styling.html#styling

There is a fundamental difference between designating some content as
not part of the current state of the application and suggesting some
content may not be necessary to display given a certain presentation
of the current state of the application. That the former implies the
later does not mean that they are the same thing.

@hidden and @aria-hidden were originally intended to indicate state,
while "display" and "visibility" are intended to suggest presentation.
Including information about presentation in the accessibility tree is
useful, conflating it with content is not.

ARIA should allow authors to distinguish the state and presentation,
not force them to conflate them.

Whatever it does, it should not incorrectly cite other specifications.

--
Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis

Received on Saturday, 28 April 2012 20:50:18 UTC