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

Hi Dominic,

 

Thank you for providing clarity here. I will ask the same question I posed to Alex to you: 

 

"do you believe that native HTML accessibility support constructs should be available to all markup languages? That ARIA is, by design, markup language agnostic and so if an accessibility feature is available in HTML, it should also be abstracted and available to other markup languages via ARIA?"

 

JF




 

From: Dominic Mazzoni [mailto:dmazzoni@google.com] 
Sent: Monday, December 8, 2014 9:16 AM
To: John Foliot
Cc: James Craig; WAI XTech; Alexander Surkov; Michael[tm] Smith; Daniel Weck; Ted O'Connor; Janina Sajka
Subject: Re: @aria-describedat at-risk in ARIA 1.1 heartbeat draft

 

On Mon, Dec 8, 2014 at 9:04 AM, John Foliot <john@foliot.ca> wrote:

I think as well that your characterization of "dissent" w.r.t. Gecko and Blink
is, shall I say, somewhat exaggerated, but (again) I think we should ask these
actors directly, and neither you nor I assume anything.

 

Just to be clear, then, I officially object/dissent to the language "User agents should provide a device-independent mechanism to allow a user to..." used anywhere in the ARIA spec, because I feel the user agent directly providing to all users a user-level feature based on an ARIA attribute is a radical departure from the rest of the ARIA spec.

 

Resolutions I would be happy with include:

* Change the language so that aria-describedat is mapped to native accessibility APIs only, like the rest of ARIA

* Or, make it part of HTML5 and take ARIA out of the name