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

Comments inline. 
> On Dec 10, 2014, at 8:44 PM, Janina Sajka <janina@rednote.net> wrote:
> 
> The ARIA-1.1 spec Introduction says the following:
> 
> "User Agent Support
> 
> ...
> 
> "Aside from using WAI-ARIA markup to improve what is exposed to
> accessibility APIs, user agents behave as they would natively. Assistive
> technologies react to the extra information in the accessibility API as
> they already do for the same information on non-web content. User agents
> that are not assistive technologies, however, need do nothing beyond
> providing appropriate updates to the accessibility API.
> 
> "The WAI-ARIA specification neither requires or forbids user agents from
> enhancing native presentation and interaction behaviors on the basis of
> WAI-ARIA markup.
> 
> Mainstream user agents might expose WAI-ARIA
> navigational landmarks (for example, as a dialog box or through a
> keyboard command) with the intention to facilitate navigation for all
> users.  User agents are encouraged to maximize their usefulness to
> users, including users without disabilities."
> 					      
> 					      We should probably fix the
> 					      grammar in the last
> 					      paragraph quoted above,
> 					      i.e. should be "neither
> 					      requires nor forbids."

Fixed. Thanks.

> 					      Beyond that I'm at a loss
> 					      to understand how this is
> 					      insufficiently clear,
> 					      including for DescribedAt.

It is clear, but it is clearly in direct conflict with the new UA reqs in
#aria-describedat.

>> The WAI-ARIA specification neither requires or forbids user agents from
>> enhancing native presentation and interaction behaviors on the basis of
>> WAI-ARIA markup. [1]

And then later, a direct contradiction in #aria-describedat:

>> User agents SHOULD provide a device-independent mechanism to allow a
>> user to navigate the user agent to content referenced by the 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. [2]


These are RFC-2119 *requirements* for the user agent to enhance its native 
presentation and interaction behaviors on the basis of WAI-ARIA markup. 

James

1. http://rawgit.com/w3c/aria/master/aria/aria.html#ua-support
2. http://rawgit.com/w3c/aria/master/aria/aria.html#aria-describedat
3. http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2119

Received on Thursday, 11 December 2014 18:14:55 UTC