Re: Handling of landmark roles on native markup

On Tue, Mar 20, 2012 at 11:27 AM, Alexander Surkov
<surkov.alexander@gmail.com> wrote:
> This behavior was
> used on the web and in Gecko. For example HTML table@role="main" was
> exposed to AT as a landmark table.

Do we have any estimates of how much deployed content depends on that
behavior that couldn't be trivially changed by a few key personnel.

Realistically, only "application", "navigation" and "search" seem
likely to be used on elements with specialised semantics rather than
"div".

The Facebook homepage uses a pattern like:

    <form role="search">

Since "search" implies a form, I'm not sure any semantics are lost
under the newer specced behaviour.

I had a grep through the Dojo Toolkit source and was somewhat
surprised to see they seem to be making no use of landmarks at all.

I also had a grep through WordPress trunk and the only case where this
might make a difference would be:

    wp-includes/theme-compat/sidebar.php:54:                <ul
role="navigation">

I guess we're saying that Firefox exposes that node in the
accessibility tree as *both* a list and a navigation landmark, whereas
the current spec would require it to expose it as a navigation
landmark only.

Question - when a "ul" is exposed as a navigation landmark only, how
are child "li" elements represented to the accessibility tree?

> Now new behavior requires us to expose it as a landmark accessible with no role.

[snip]

> I don't see a good reason of this.

Well, I guess one good reason is it seems impossible to speak with
consistent language about this: note your emails slips from talking
about "special kinds of roles" to "no role".

This sort of ambiguity seems likely to confuse developers new to the
@role attribute.

--
Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis

Received on Wednesday, 21 March 2012 22:15:23 UTC