Re: Is ARIA A11y only? [Was: @aria-describedat at-risk ...]

> On Dec 9, 2014, at 12:46 PM, Richard Schwerdtfeger <schwer@us.ibm.com> wrote:
> The ARIA task force did not reach consensus on this and you should not be posting what is at risk.
> 
The requirement in question (not the entire property) is not implemented and several implementors have indicated an unwillingness and/or concern regarding implementation, which means it's at risk whether the working group has consensus or not.  

The only edit I made this week was requested by Janina and Michael, which was to remove the noted comments from the specification and instead point to the list archive where the discussion could continue… as it is continuing. They specifically requested a publicly postable archive, so XTech was the logical place.
> I understand you have a personal issue on this but that should not pass to group consensus. 
> 
> Rich
> 

I have no personal issue against this and reject the implication that my edits were somehow personally motivated. If I let personal motivations drive my edits, I would never have added the property in the first place. I do, however, have *technical* issues with these requirements, as I expressed to the group on numerous occasions:

>> User agents should provide a device-independent mechanism to allow a user to navigate the user agent to content referenced by the aria-describedat <http://rawgit.com/w3c/aria/master/aria/aria.html#aria-describedat> attribute. User agents should also provide a device-independent mechanism to return the user's focus from the descriptive content view to the original content view. For example, a user agent may provide access to the document or document fragment referenced by the aria-describedat <http://rawgit.com/w3c/aria/master/aria/aria.html#aria-describedat> attribute in a contextual menu associated with the object.


These requirements are specifically *NOT IMPLEMENTABLE* in any reasonable way because they do not follow any established ARIA pattern, and conflict with the defined behavior of every native host language. The requirements are at-risk, so they are marked as at-risk. It would be inappropriate if I did *not* note the at-risk status.

James