generic roles (Was: 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)

This one came up at the F2F, too.

ISSUE-638: Generic container roles for things like div/span…
https://www.w3.org/WAI/PF/Group/track/issues/638

block and inline aren’t specific enough. For example, <h2> is a block, but clearly should have the role “heading” not “block”. Likewise <a href> (links) are inline, but should retain their “link” roles.

This may  something like “generic” and if the platform mapping needed to, it would automatically map “generic” to a platform-specific difference between block and inline. I’m not yet convinced that we need separate roles for block and inline though.


On Jan 28, 2014, at 8:54 AM, T.V Raman <raman@google.com> wrote:

> Jon,
> Borrowing block/inline from CSS  as role values is a good idea;
> an even better idea is to just mirror over CSS state into the
> accessibility side, i.e. make display:inline  create an implicit
> role="inline"  on the ARIA  side, rather than asking  authors to
> write both.
> 
> Gunderson, Jon R writes:
>> Another idea is to borrow from the CSS concepts of "block" and "inline".
>> 
>> Role="block" and role="inline"
>> 
>> This would provide some semantics as to where the "text" content is part of something that stands on its own (e.g. block), versus part of something more (e.g. inline).
>> 
>> I know Cynthia Shelley and Rich have talked about concatenating text runs, and this would provide some way to give ATs a hint on how to do that and developers already have some idea what block and inline mean from CSS.  I am not sure how they would interpret "none", just like the confusion over "presentation".
>> 
>> Jon
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: Jason White [mailto:jason@jasonjgw.net] 
>> Sent: Monday, January 27, 2014 6:12 PM
>> To: wai-xtech@w3.org; w3c-wai-pf@w3.org WAI-PFWG
>> Subject: 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 <jcraig@apple.com> wrote:
>>> Thanks for the feedback Suzanne. Whether or not “none” is the best 
>>> replacement is irrelevant. The confusion is not around images. It it 
>>> around the use of role="presentation" on other elements. For example:
>>> 
>>> The following marking: <h4 role="presentation">Foo</h4>
>>> 
>>> is effectively the same as: <div>Foo</div>
>>> 
>> 
>> Perhaps role="generic" would be more descriptive for the uninitiated.
>> 
>> 
>> 
>

Received on Tuesday, 28 January 2014 23:48:09 UTC