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

To PFWG (and copying the referenced individuals)… Also copying XTECH since the ARIA topics are now moving to Bugzilla and open issue tracking.

In the ARIA F2F meeting last week, we decided to reopen the issue of renaming the term “presentation” as a role. the name is too long, but more importantly, it’s way too easily confused with aria-hidden.

This topic to “shorten the name ‘presentation’” was raised this time by Rich, although he seemed to have forgotten the contentious history of the previous debate. Therefore I’d like to summarize the previous discussion and point out that I think this issue was previously handled poorly by the PFWG ARIA Task Force. Although I still agree with changing the name (I suggested role="none"), the work involved will be much, much more difficult now that ARIA 1.0 is done, because we have to deprecate it rather than remove it, and this pushes much of the responsibility onto authors. We should have resolved this formal comment for ARIA 1.0 when it was originally raised by Kelly Ford.

PFWG-ISSUE-348: Consider renaming (now actually 'deprecating' in ARIA 1.1) role="presentation" to avoid avoid author confusion
https://www.w3.org/WAI/PF/Group/track/issues/348

This topic was originally raised by a WG member, Microsoft Member Representative, Kelly Ford. 

Quoting Kelly from https://www.w3.org/WAI/PF/Group/comments/details?comment_id=166
> We believe that role=presentation is problematic, beginning with the word "presentation", continuing on to possible misinterpretation of what should be presentation, and possible mis-use of role=presentation by authors who want to avoid extra effort, thereby hiding real information from AT who respect that role.
End quote.

Much evidence was presented to support this argument, including the fact that even accessibility *experts* (including Derek Featherstone and Steve Faulkner) thought it was interchangeable with aria-hidden, specifically because of the name “presentation”:

Quoting Derek from https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/free-aria/c6aw0zwUAnM
> This attribute should work on any node, though, correct? I was under the impression that this simply wasn't for images, but for any node that "should not be exposed" to AT via whatever means. 

End quote.

And Steve Faulkner’s reply from the same thread:
> thats my understanding. 
End quote.

Ultimately the issue was dismissed (via majority consensus, but with strong objections) because it would require a few user agents to update a single token value, which is possibly one of the easiest changes in UA programming, period.

Quoting Rich from https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Member/w3c-wai-pf/2009JulSep/0089.html
> Well I am [[saying that changing the name is wrong]]. There are tons of implementations out there using role="presentation". We have a lot better things to do than change the name of a role. That requires us to go out and fix browser, web content, and ATs all over the place for a name change with no significant functional value add. I think we should be spending our resources on fixing bigger problems like canvas as opposed to things like that.
End quote.

Quoting myself from the reply: https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Member/w3c-wai-pf/2009JulSep/0092.html
> I think that's the wrong justification for defending against a change. Our first responsibility is to get ARIA 1.0 right. It won't matter that it works when done according to spec if authors are confused enough to do it the wrong way. This is a recurring confusion from authors and commenters about what 'presentation' means. The comment by Kelly Ford [1] is well justified and mentions a problem that we desperately want to avoid, that "…developers are going to get confused from the outset and we'll be stuck with bad implementations from the outset."
> 
> Worse yet, read the free-aria thread referenced in the comment. Even accessibility experts like Derek Featherstone and Steve Faulkner are/were confused at the terminology and usage. I have to admit a similar confusion when I first read that part of the draft.
End quote.

We’re now seeing this as a major authoring problem. Many of us have presentation slides attempting to clarify the difference between role="presentation" and aria-hidden="true" because it’s misused so frequently. This issue would have been much easier to fix in 1.0. We’re now going to have to recommend authors do something like role="none presentation" for years to be backwards-compatible with “ARIA 1.0 Compliant” implementations. 

Please let this be a lesson to every W3C contributor that existing implementations (or lack thereof) of any *pre-1.0* specification should never be cause for blocking improvements to the language. 

Thanks,
James Craig

Received on Monday, 27 January 2014 21:14:24 UTC