Re: [css-grid][css-flexbox] a11y, tools, and reordering

On 06/17/2015 02:28 AM, fantasai wrote:
> Suggestion that came out of discussions at CSSDay: Put a conformance requirement
> on *authoring tools* that whenever they reorder something visually, it's reflected
> in the DOM (and not just hacked up with CSS grid positioning or 'order') unless the
> author explicitly requested (i.e. opted in) to keep them different.

Proposed wording:

In order to preserve the author's intended ordering in all presentation modes,
authoring tools--including WYSIWYG editors as well as Web-based authoring aids--
must reorder the underlying document source and not use 'order' to perform
reordering unless the author has explicitly indicated that the underlying
document order (which determines speech and navigation order) should be
<em>out-of-sync</em> with the visual order.

For example, a tool might offer both drag-and-drop reordering of flex items
as well as handling of media queries for alternate layouts per screen size
range. Since most of the time, reordering should affect all screen ranges as
well as navigation and speech order, the tool would perform drag-and-drop
reordering at the DOM layer. In some cases, however, the author may want
different visual orderings per screen size. The tool could offer this
functionality using 'order' together with media queries, but also tie the
smallest screen size's ordering to the underlying DOM order (since this is
most likely to be a logical linear presentation order) while using 'order'
to determine the visual presentation order in other size ranges. This tool
would be conformant, whereas a tool that only ever used 'order' to handle
drag-and-drop reordering (however convenient it might be to implement it
that way) would be non-conformant.

~fantasai

Received on Monday, 31 August 2015 23:22:43 UTC