- From: Joanmarie Diggs <jdiggs@igalia.com>
- Date: Sat, 01 Feb 2014 12:36:00 -0500
- To: James Craig <jcraig@apple.com>
- CC: Cynthia Shelly <cyns@microsoft.com>, Bryan Garaventa <bryan.garaventa@whatsock.com>, "T.V Raman" <raman@google.com>, "jongund@illinois.edu" <jongund@illinois.edu>, "jason@jasonjgw.net" <jason@jasonjgw.net>, "wai-xtech@w3.org" <wai-xtech@w3.org>, "w3c-wai-pf@w3.org WAI-PFWG" <w3c-wai-pf@w3.org>
On 02/01/2014 04:06 AM, James Craig wrote:
> On Jan 31, 2014, at 11:14 AM, Joanmarie Diggs <jdiggs@igalia.com>
> wrote:
>
>> Silly question: Why not role="div"?
>
> Three reasons for me:
<snip>
Thank you for the explanation. While I'm not sure I fully agree with
those reasons, I will concede that they sound sufficiently reasonable.
;) But this:
> My top contenders so far are “none”, “null”, and the empty string
> (“”).
continues to strike me as problematic. And I suspect going that route
may further increase, rather than resolve, an issue you cited earlier in
this thread:
The following marking:
<h4 role="presentation">Foo</h4>
is effectively the same as:
<div>Foo</div>
But many authors are using it to mean this:
<h4 aria-hidden="true">Foo</h4>
And that’s a major problem I hope we can resolve, regardless of the
solution.
I think we need a self-documenting role name which clearly communicates
to web developers the fact that the use of this attribute will cause
that element's contents to be exposed via the platform accessibility
API(s) using some API-specific role and potentially presented to end
users via their AT. A null/empty role fails to communicate that (IMHO).
I think this self-documenting role name should also clearly communicate
to user agent developers the fact that some valid, known role should be
used when exposing that element via platform accessibility API(s). Here,
too, the null/empty role falls short. Taking ATK as an example, your
contenders seem like they should map to either ATK_ROLE_UNKNOWN or
ATK_ROLE_INVALID -- and the contents would likely be ignored by ATs as a
result. After all, if the implementor doesn't know what the heck it is,
all bets (and AT heuristics) are off.
My top contender so far, given "div" seems problematic, is "plaintext."
--joanie
Received on Saturday, 1 February 2014 17:36:44 UTC