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

Regarding role="none" etc:

Don’t know if Joanmarie meant same thing, but role="none" reminds of 
"no role".  And "no role" is already a thing in HTML5. The link to its 
definition in fact ends with ”role-none”:

http://www.w3.org/html/wg/drafts/html/CR/dom.html#concept-role-none


And it is used there in tables of the aria mappings:

http://www.w3.org/html/wg/drafts/html/CR/dom.html#sec-strong-native-semantics

http://www.w3.org/html/wg/drafts/html/CR/dom.html#sec-implicit-aria-semantics


Role="presentation" is hard to mix with "no role". None/zero/empty are 
can more easily be associated with "no role". So at least, the issue 
should be given concideration.

Leif Halvard Silli

James Craig, Sat, 01 Feb 2014 10:11:10 -0800:
>> 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’m not sure I understand the confusion around why role="none" or 
> role="null" would indicate that their is “no role” for the node. 
> Perhaps you can help me understand the confusion? That’s effectively 
> what role="presentation" means, but it’s just poorly named. 
> 
>> 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).
> 
> I may be misunderstanding some platform-specific API mapping for the 
> currently used role. On the AX API, role="presentation” means “
> there is no role for the current node, so don’t expose it to the 
> tree, but expose all of the descendant contents as normal.”  
> 
>> 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.
> 
> I think the ATK mapping should just promote the child contents and 
> not expose the parent DOM node, because it has no role.

Received on Saturday, 1 February 2014 22:15:55 UTC