WebAIM - Web Accessibility In Mind

E-mail List Archives

HTML specs - can I whine for a minute?

for

From: glen walker
Date: Aug 19, 2021 12:21PM

I used to use https://www.w3.org/TR/html53/ when I'd quote about html
specs. I know that version was being phased out and how that page
automatically redirects to https://html.spec.whatwg.org/

One of the nice things about the previous version of the spec was that it
had accessibility information combined with all the other information.
There were two sections called "Allowed ARIA role attribute values" and
"Allowed ARIA state and property attributes". Those two sections have been
removed from the whatwg spec. Does anyone know if that's intentional or
will they be brought back?

The new spec has an "Accessibility considerations" link but it points to a
generic definition that makes you follow a link to "ARIAHTML" (
https://html.spec.whatwg.org/#refsARIAHTML), which is another generic
section that points to "ARIA in HTML" (https://w3c.github.io/html-aria/),
which finally has some information in it, but you then have to search for
the right html element. It's a lot of hunting for information that used to
be all concise and grouped together.

For example, the <button> element, here's a link to the archived old spec:

https://web.archive.org/web/20210606185950/http://www.w3.org/TR/html53/sec-forms.html#the-button-element

It's easy to see the default role is "button" and the other roles that are
applicable.

The new spec is

https://html.spec.whatwg.org/#the-button-element

If you follow the accessibility links to the "ARIA in HTML" (
https://w3c.github.io/html-aria/), you still have to search for the button
info on that page. It'd be nice if the whatwg doc pointed directly to
https://w3c.github.io/html-aria/#el-button for the accessibility info.
It'd be even better if that info was all contained in one place for the
button spec.