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

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From: Rakesh
Date: Jan 28, 2013 10:10AM

Dear Birkir,
I agree with you for navigation and main content landmarks. Screen
reader users often use various techniques to jump on to the main content
area. Land marks can be one among them. I personally think users
generally dont jump to any other portion of the page such as footer so
the remaining land marks such as contentinfo, complimentary do not make
much sense.
For land marks such as contact address, usually the contact details of
any website will be provided in a separate page so I don't think it make
any difference if we use a land mark for it.
In addition now-a-days every website is coming with links "Share it on
facebook" and "Share it on twitter". Users are also using this feature
quite often. I think it is a better idea to provide a land mark for this
social media section.
Thanks & Regards
Rakesh
www.maxability.co.in

On 1/24/2013 3:34 AM, Birkir R. Gunnarsson wrote:
> 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
> > >