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Re: most important ARIA

for

From: Bryan Garaventa
Date: Jan 4, 2019 1:22PM

Hi,
It's important to keep in mind that Visual ARIA is a teaching tool, not a testing tool. So if you try to break it, you will likely succeed.

When building it, I had to balance many different concepts, and ARIA not being simple is one of them. There are many rules and criteria, and including which ones had to be balanced by applying flexible low-overhead messages that would try to show up as well as possible within reason, and 100% success is an impossible goal post if this is what you expect to see on all pages.

The best environment for using Visual ARIA is within the development process, where people can experiment with ARIA usage in a controlled environment and then use the feedback from Visual ARIA while interacting with it to positively shape accessible widget construction in practice.

As an example, when building the accessible React integration project at
https://github.com/whatsock/bootstrap-react
I included Visual ARIA as an offline import that loads in a dormant state so it can be toggled on and off during development by those wishing to do exactly that.

The AccName computation is a work in progress, and this will be changing in the future as I edit the AccName spec to address issues raised in the 1.2 update for
http://www.w3.org/TR/accname-1.1/
So Visual ARIA will be updated accordingly as I do that, but even so, this is meant only as an approximation since the critical aspects of AccName are meant for the browser venders to implement at an algorithm level, and the act of rendering anything within a webpage changes the accessible names of those controls.

It's not possible to expect perfect tooltip rendering on all sites with Visual ARIA, because as part of balancing rules versus UI in creating it, it must borrow from the parent site to display using certain visual rules. Otherwise, individual class overrides would have to be created on everything to account for all possible CSS rule varients and that would inflate the code so much that it wouldn't be usable publically. At present there are over 150 thousand lines of code already. You are welcome to download the source code and check this out to see what I mean.

So even so, I still recommend that all sighted developers use Visual ARIA because it will significantly improve the output of those building interactive ARIA widgets for public consumption.

All the best,
Bryan



Bryan Garaventa
Principle Accessibility Architect
Level Access, Inc.
<EMAIL REMOVED>
415.624.2709 (o)
www.LevelAccess.com