Re: Summarizing the contentious history of re-opened PFWG-ISSUE-348: Consider renaming (now actually 'deprecating' in ARIA 1.1) role="presentation" to avoid avoid author confusion

James Craig, Sat, 01 Feb 2014 01:06:58 -0800:
> On Jan 31, 2014, at 11:14 AM, Joanmarie Diggs <jdiggs@igalia.com> wrote:

> 3. User agents, knowing that divs are sometimes meaningful, use 
> heuristics to determine whether to expose one to platform 
> accessibility APIs as a generic grouping container, which is not the 
> same as an element that has been explicitly designated as 
> semantically meaningless.

Are <div> and <div role=presentation"> semantically different to AT? 
What about <span> vs <span role="presentation">? (See example in ARIA 
1.1 [1])

> If we say that role="div" is a synonym of 
> role="presentation", we’re implying that <div>s should never be 
> exposed to accessibility APIs, which is likely to break a lot of 
> things.
> 
> My top contenders so far are “none”, “null”, and the empty string (“”).

I think role="flat", role="flattened" or role="flatten" are better. 
Because, what presentation role does is that it flattens the signals 
from many to just one. E.g. for <img>, it flattens the two layers - 
alternative text and picture - into just one thing - picture. And for 
headings, it flattens hierarchic text to just (plain) text.

 Flat/Flattened is known from many fields as a name for simplification 
processes were the result is that the basic content is kept while the 
styling and/or structure is lost. Flat/Flattened thus tells authors 
that *not everything* is lost, something which could help them 
understand that the result of flattening an img is different from the 
result of flattening  a heading - and also help them understand how 
flatten differs from hiding. Also, for flat/flattens, chances are that 
authors understand that it is not necessary to apply it to elements 
that are already flat, such as <span> or <img> with empty alt="".

Some other options roughly in the lane, though I prefer "flatten":

  role="transparent"
  role="plain"
  role="blank"

[1] http://www.w3.org/TR/wai-aria-1.1/roles#presentation

-- 
leif halvard silli

Received on Saturday, 1 February 2014 12:40:14 UTC