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

This reminds me of a question I sometimes still get from developers, if 
role=presentation can be used to hide images, why can't it be used to do the 
same on other elements?

The answer being of course, that an IMG tag has no child content or 
elements, so when role=presentation is applied it removes the tag from the 
accessibility tree so it is effectively hidden. If this were applied to a 
container though, the child content would not be effected, except in the 
case of a Table element, where the immediate TR and TD tags would also be 
removed, leaving only the content behind.

As opposed to aria-hidden, which will remove the current element from the 
accessibility tree, including all child content and elements, similar to 
display:none.

The difference shouldn't be confusing to people by now, but there are a lot 
of people who still don't know the difference between them.


----- Original Message ----- 
From: <jason@jasonjgw.net>
To: <wai-xtech@w3.org>; <w3c-wai-pf@w3.org>
Sent: Wednesday, January 29, 2014 1:34 AM
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


> Cynthia Shelly <cyns@microsoft.com> wrote:
>> It can sometimes it can be difficult to teach, especially to people who
>> don't really know the difference between null, empty string, none, blank 
>> and
>> space.  There are many such people creating web content, though they are
>> less likely to deal with aria than with alt.
>>
>> Other than that issue, I've always been ok with alt="".  Does anyone 
>> recall
>> why people dislike it?
>
> There may be some who think it should be possible simply to omit the alt 
> value
> entirely, and that alt="" is an unnecessary work-around for the fact that 
> in
> HTML 4, this wasn't allowed. In HTML 5, omission is permitted (mapped to 
> ARIA
> role=image, whereas alt="" maps to role=presentation).
>
>

Received on Wednesday, 29 January 2014 19:12:10 UTC