WebAIM - Web Accessibility In Mind

E-mail List Archives

Re: Info widgets with role="dialog"

for

From: Bryan Garaventa
Date: Jan 21, 2015 3:31PM

This is something I've already brought up
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-pfwg/2014Nov/0095.html
So it's already on the radar.

-----Original Message-----
From: <EMAIL REMOVED> [mailto: <EMAIL REMOVED> ] On Behalf Of _mallory
Sent: Wednesday, January 21, 2015 1:29 PM
To: WebAIM Discussion List
Subject: Re: [WebAIM] Info widgets with role="dialog"

Maybe serious thought should be made to the idea of a "popup".

Sighted users just know when they hit one and don't care if it's got forms, text, links, or an annoying animated gif of a cat.

As far as they're concerned, a "popup" dialog is something that forces their attention and prevents them from interacting with the
rest of the page until they close it.

It would be nice if "dialog" meant this, instead of "dialog but only dialogs with forms in them". Not what web developers think when
one says "dialog" at all. They think "that thing browsers pop up like javascript alerts or browser chrome stating something died".

Can this be, like, back-pedaled and rethought so it can go back to something more practical? We merely want -users to be interupted
from the page -forced to view with and deal with the popup -after closing, be exactly back where they were

and not care what the content inside was.

_mallory

On Wed, Jan 21, 2015 at 02:39:37PM -0500, Birkir R. Gunnarsson wrote:
> Sorry Bryan, bad wording on my part there.
> Yes, myself, Bryan and others are hard at work revising the ARIA
> authoring guidelines, so comments such as those made here will surely
> make their way into those discussions and that process, so people's
> feedback and concerns are always welcome and duely noted.
> Jared, I totally see what you are saying, generally putting focus on
> an html element that has no interactive functionality is confusing and
> can do more harm than good.
> To some extent, we should be more aggressive about help teaching users
> how to switch between modes in screen readers that offer that
> functionality.
> Also make sure that screen readers that operate this way actually
> switch to browse mode when focus lands on an element with role
> document, .. not always the case today.
>
> Cheers
> -Birkir
>