Re: ARIA demo for MathML intent

Hi all,

Quick follow-up here after one brief round of feedback from Neil - the
examples have been updated, while also keeping the old ones for
comparison.

- Tab navigation now works on Chrome + Screen Reader. Combined
text+formula narration on-click is now also operational.
- Some of the partial vocalizations are improved, though my UX
decisions are all tentative/subject to personal taste.

These recent changes appear to be working *around* an implementation,
rather than improving on the ARIA dialect itself. But the demo is
cleaner for it, hopefully we get to discuss it together on July 15th.

Same link as before:
https://hackmd.io/@dginev/SkBHsZTiO

Greetings,
Deyan

On Sun, Jun 20, 2021 at 7:15 PM Deyan Ginev <deyan.ginev@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Dear all,
>
> I'm transferring a technical piece of an internal discussion we are
> trying to have (about aligning the motivation for the "intent"
> attribute within the group), to the public list.
>
> Moritz has re-made his call to reexamine existing specifications
> before inventing our own new markup. I like the sentiment of "not
> reinventing the wheel unless we can make it rounder". But I also hope
> we can try to make these points in a competitive way -- by showing why
> certain methods are better than others when calling for examining
> them.
>
> You may remember my "tiny showcase" has a parallel capability (thanks
> to latexml) for generating both an "intent" annotation, as well as a
> parallel presentation+content cross-referenced MathML 3 tree, and
> indeed can synthesize narration with each variant. That demo is at
> [1], and you can try those via the "math format" toggle, say via
> converting "\binom{a}{b}". I had tried to make the Content MathML
> variant as attractive as possible, but I still am not that fond of it
> myself. Just making sure we're making informed choices.
>
> The second side of the task to "investigate existing specs" is ARIA,
> which I think we haven't examined fully as a group yet.
> At least I hadn't - I am still learning about the existing AT
> universe. Neil had claimed ARIA isn't sophisticated enough to do the
> structural expressions we want, such as "binomial-coefficient($1,$2)",
> however that seems to be a bit of an understatement, thanks to
> "aria-labelledby", as I discovered this weekend.
>
> What's more - to my own delight - the "aria-describedby" attribute
> allows for an inclusion for secondary properties as annotations, and
> indeed some existing speech engines make use of these as well. I only
> succeeded in using Chrome+Screen Reader this time, so all my
> observations are tied to this AT setup. It's funny, since Chrome can't
> display the math in my link, but for my demo it can read it
> regardless.
>
> So, with this long introduction, here is a working variant of our
> "intent" concept using entirely the existing ARIA and MathML 3, and a
> very ordinary HackMD document:
>
> https://hackmd.io/@dginev/SkBHsZTiO
>
> There is a lot of friction to be unhappy about
> - for a perfect alignment with the intent "speech hints" we would need
> AT tools to be able to do smart narrations over the values of
> "aria-labelledby", the way they would over the intent expression
> values. A common example of that is adding prepositions ("from", "to",
> "at", ...) at the right points.
> - ARIA requires global ids to make the composition work, and the group
> tends to frown on those
> - I have too much freedom to annotate in a non-content way and still
> get good narration. Empty mrow/mo/mstyle with aria-label? Sure,
> anything goes, and in any point in the document - courtesy of global
> ids.
> - the AT tools are currently a bit fragile. E.g. for some reason the
> tab-based navigation doesn't pick up the ARIA attributes at all.
> Instead it reads the raw presentation tree. I only got Chrome to read
> the ARIA markup when clicking on the nodes using the mouse.
> - generally navigating with the keyboard for the AT tool is super
> unclear to me as a new user. I really like using tab, but apparently
> that is only viable if pretty much everything has a "tabindex"
> attribute? Strange.
>
> But with all the complaints, as a first-time ARIA user, I got the demo
> working. So that's nice. And when it works, it can work really well -
> hearing subexpressions with the right narration, and then with the
> auxiliary property clarified, is very rewarding.
>
> Greetings,
> Deyan
>
> [1] https://dginev.github.io/tiny-mathml-a11y-demo/

Received on Friday, 2 July 2021 13:46:39 UTC