tooltip role

Hi all, while attempting (and failing) to get an ARIA tooltip to be
announced by screen readers across browsers I had a look at the ARIA
implementation guide for expected behaviour in browsers.

It was unclear to me how tooltip show/hide events are expected to be
processed.

What I found was that in Firefox the ARIA tooltip implemention was the same
as the native tootlip implemention i.e

ARIA tooltip
OBJ_SHOW     Name="This is the tip" Role=tool tip State=normal
OBJ_HIDE     Name="This is the tip" Role=tool tip State=invisible,offscreen

native tooltip
OBJ_SHOW     Name="native tooltip" Role=tool tip State=read only,floating
OBJ_HIDE     (hidden)

this was not the case in IE or Chrome on windows nether of which fired any
events when the ARIA tooltip was shown/hidden

test file https://dl.dropbox.com/u/377471/tests/tooltip-gez.html


I haven't checked events fired in Safari 6 on Mac OS Lion with Voiceover,
but can confirm that the ARIA tooltip in the test case file does not get
announced by VoiceOver.

>From testing so far it appears that  ARIA tooltip role does not yet have
interoperable implementation. Is that a fair assessment? and if so is it at
an at risk feature?


-- 
with regards

Steve Faulkner
Technical Director - TPG

www.paciellogroup.com | www.HTML5accessibility.com |
www.twitter.com/stevefaulkner
HTML5: Techniques for providing useful text alternatives -
dev.w3.org/html5/alt-techniques/
Web Accessibility Toolbar - www.paciellogroup.com/resources/wat-ie-about.html