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Re: What ARIA role should a pointer have?

for

From: Isabel Holdsworth
Date: Jul 23, 2018 7:42AM

If I came across a focusable element with a role of "definition", I'm
not sure I'd have the first clue what to do with it. Role="pointer" or
something similar would be great here, but I don't suppose such a role
would have many use cases.

I guess this is more of a box-ticking exercise than anything else. We
don't like to create widgets with poor semantics, and we feel this one
kind of falls into that ballpark, but it wouldn't be terribly useful
to screenreader users even if there was a perfect solution.

Cheers for your thoughts though - if nothing else they've validated
our position that there's no suitable role for our pointer scenario.

Thanks, Lynn

On 23/07/2018, glen walker < <EMAIL REMOVED> > wrote:
> Yes, I was hesitant to point it out but the problem was that there was not
> an existing role that fit and aria-roledescription seems to be the way to
> solve that. Would love to hear if you have a better idea.
>
> Another option that sorta kinda works if you use your imagination, is to
> use a role="definition" and role="term", but again I'm not sure how well
> supported they are. role="definition" has been around since ARIA 1.0 but
> role="term" is new in 1.1. Native <dl>, <dd>, and <dt> has various support
> (I know NVDA and JAWS treat them differently) so these roles might be
> treated similarly.
>
> Since you are asking a question and the answer relies on moving the object
> to the right spot, the answer could be considered the "definition". I
> suppose you could use role="term" on the question but am not sure that's
> necessary, although the doc of "definition" says you should pair it with
> "term". With role="definition" on the moveable object in combination with
> aria-roledescription, it might be enough to get your point across. Not
> perfect, but better than nothing.
>
>
> On Mon, Jul 23, 2018 at 5:37 AM, Patrick H. Lauke < <EMAIL REMOVED> >
> wrote:
>
>> Related to aria-roledescription, I'd be careful in embracing that. AT
>> users know what certain specific roles are, and how they can be interacted
>> with. While it's cute that we can give very custom and specific announced
>> roles, they will invariable lead to confusion as AT users will potentially
>> have no clue what, say, a "hotspot" is compared to a "button" or some
>> other
>> standard role.
>>
>>
> > > > >