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Re: ARIA landmarks, why are they not more descriptive?

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From: Lucy Greco
Date: Jan 23, 2013 3:38PM

I agree with you
The one problem I see with adding more kinds of landmarks is that currently
screen readers can only move mark to mark and not by kind of mark you might
want. screen readers should add this before we get more kinds of marks I
don't want to add more extraneous types before I can say never show my
Facebook or twitter feeds


-----Original Message-----
From: <EMAIL REMOVED>
[mailto: <EMAIL REMOVED> ] On Behalf Of Birkir R.
Gunnarsson
Sent: Wednesday, January 23, 2013 2:05 PM
To: WebAIM Discussion List
Subject: [WebAIM] ARIA landmarks, why are they not more descriptive?

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
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