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ARIA landmarks, why are they not more descriptive?

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From: Birkir R. Gunnarsson
Date: Jan 23, 2013 3:04PM


Dear all

Two posts in one day, I know. This won't become the norm.
Recently, as part of accessibility manual testing, I have been
consulting on how best to split websites up into logical regions (of
course together with proper use of headings and skip-to links).
A few of the standard ARIA landmarks are smart, and make good sense to
me. "Main" and "Navigation" definitely.
Others simply don't quite make sense to me, and I have not seen them
implemented consistently across the website that have used them.
"banner" and "complementary info" mainly.
At the same time I am surprised we don't standardize a few landmarks
around use cases that occur almost on every single website.
Such landmarks, as I see them would be:
1. Contact information (address, phone number, social media contacts,
opening hours etc.). I see these nearly everywhere, and I have advised
to create a custom region for this.

2. Comments: This is slightly less used than "contact info", but I
often find that comments do not start with a heading (yes,some can say
bad design I know), and I very often have to scroll with arrow keys to
find them, yet they are extremely common on many websites that allow
user feedback.

3. Actions: This would be a subset of "navigation" but specifically
around a list of actions or operations a user can perform on a
website, less common still, but quite common once a user has logged
into a website (online banking or an online store).

Does anyone agree with me, see other things they wish were a standard
ARIA landmark, or has background information on the development of
these landmarks to explain why "banner" and "complementary info" were
chosen over more content specific varieties?
I thought I was just being daft and the use of these was obvious, but
from my browsing and looking at different sites, I see that clearly I
am not alone in this and it seems "banner" and "complimentary info" is
used somewhat inconsistently.
Given all the discussion around the html5 semantics I thought it'd be
ok to bring this up here.
Again, if anyone reading this was a part of developing the ARIA specs.
I am grateful to you guys, it proves enormously useful in some cases,
and do not take this as any type of bashing.
Cheers
-B