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Re: Behaviour being triggered by ARIAUsing title attribute on non-anchor elements?

for

From: Chaals McCathie Nevile
Date: May 3, 2016 5:23PM

On Mon, 02 May 2016 16:23:59 +0100, < <EMAIL REMOVED> > wrote:

> On Mon, 2 May 2016, Paul J. Adam wrote:
>
>> Would be nice if the browser developers would make their title tooltips
>> keyboard operable by default!
>
> It would be nice indeed if ubiquitous use cases which can only be
> made accessible by knowledgeable developers using JavaScript wisely were
> instead made natively available in the browser.

Yes.

> It would also be nice if WAI-ARIA functionality could be natively made
> available in the browser, so, for example, something with a role=button
> would not require a knowledgeable developer to add JavaScript in order
> to enable keyboard functionality.

Indeed. I have spent some time working on this, talking to e.g. W3C TAG
about it, and so on…

> I keep being told this is a battle I will never win, so I should stop
> asking for it. I'm not that kind of cynic, though. Browser
> manufacturers can be convinced that having hundreds of thousands of
> developers idiosyncratically coding their own solutions and JavaScript
> is not nearly as good an idea as actually enabling this
> universally-desired functionality in the browser.

Quite.

Although, as always, it turns out that we need to explain the problem, not
the solution. Trust me - I've got that horse and cart backwards on this
very question, multiple times.

In particular it turns out that if we trigger the behaviour *from ARIA*
there are likely implications for backwards compatibility that mean
browsers will never go there.

But being able to attach the important pieces of behaviour more easily
than having to write an entire script would be great.

In particular, the idea that content developers should be trying to write
the User Interface in javascript strikes me as mad - there literally isn't
enough capability in the platform for a developer to know what the user
needs and is capable of doing, in order to successfully produce an
accessible user interface for those who don't happen to fit the "dominant
paradigms".

> I cannot believe that Tim Cook and Satya Nadella and Sundar Pichai have
> stated, "No, we will never expose accessibility functionality in the
> browsers for people who are not using assistive technology." Nor do I
> believe that the accessibility teams at the browser manufacturers are so
> opposed to improving accessibility that "we will never win this
> argument" makes any sense.

In my experience you are quite right about this. However it is the case
that if accessibility teams who mostly work on a software application like
a browser don't understand the particular problem, they're unlikely to
accept a solution on faith - most of them have been down too many
dead-ends from doing that and are rightly concerned to invest their
precious resources where they will bring the most return.

So we need to make the argument, and we need to make it clearly and well.
My own efforts are somewhat flawed, but I'm happy when people build on
them or help me do so - as indeed Deborah has over the years.

cheers

Chaals

--
Charles McCathie Nevile - web standards - CTO Office, Yandex
<EMAIL REMOVED> - - - Find more at http://yandex.com