@aria-describedat at-risk in ARIA 1.1 heartbeat draft

I met with Michael and Janina today. We're moving this thread to wai-xtech (BCC public-html-a11y for reference) because the at-risk status of aria-describedat will be referenced in the upcoming heartbeat draft for ARIA 1.1. WAI-XTECH is open to join and post, where the HTML and PF lists are not, so additional comments may be made as replies to this thread.

Thanks,
James


> On Jul 28, 2014, at 2:26 PM, James Craig <jcraig@apple.com> wrote:
> 
> + Alex and Dominic
> 
> 
>>> On Jul 28, 2014, at 12:27 PM, James Craig <jcraig@apple.com> wrote:
>>> 
>>>> On Jul 25, 2014, at 8:05 PM, Janina Sajka <janina@rednote.net> wrote:
>>>> 
>>>> It is not news that there are strong opinions concerning both longdesc
>>>> and ARIA-DescribedAt. However, it would be best for us all to carefully
>>>> double-check, and even document our assertions about the positions of
>>>> entities other than our own before representing them categorically in
>>>> public email.
>>> 
>>> Comments made both publicly and privately have indicated that individuals from the Chrome and Mozilla teams disapprove of the aspect of @aria-describedat that affects mainstream UI. I also added an editorial note to the spec.
> 
> 
> Here's the context of one quote from Alex:
> http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-pfwg/2014Jun/0013.html
> 
> And my response: 
> http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-pfwg/2014Jun/0015.html
> 
> 
> I contacted Dominic off-list to ask if I could share his comment in context. I had forgotten that the original was a non-public email. He agreed and here's the context.
> 
> Dominic wrote:
> 
>> I have no strong opinion on supporting longdesc and/or aria-describedat for exclusive use by screen readers or other AT - i.e. as something that'd be invisible to most users.
>> 
>> One thing I feel more strongly about: until now, everything in ARIA only affects how the user agent communicates with AT, it never changes the visual layout or the semantics of how the page works for users who aren't running any AT. Exposing aria-describedat in the context menu would be a significant departure from this. One potential concern is that web developers would become more suspicious of ARIA in general and not want to apply simple accessibility bug fixes without worrying about the implications for their design.


I've expressed the same concern with aria-describedat, in addition to the concerns Ted listed in the formal objection to longdesc.

Received on Friday, 5 December 2014 22:12:23 UTC