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Re: Relationship between WCAG and the ARIA in HTML specification

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From: Patrick H. Lauke
Date: Aug 6, 2023 4:10PM

On 06/08/2023 22:10, Birkir R. Gunnarsson wrote:
> Yup, y'all thought about it a lot more than I did. ;)
> What I like about 4.1.1 is how directly you can do validation and how
> easily you can just tie the validation to the markup, no
> interpretation required.

Sure, but that also led to a lot of pointless fails that had no impact
on anything.

Particularly since 4.1.1 didn't mean "valid per the spec", but rather a
concept much closer to XML's "well-formedness" (e.g. that you didn't
misnest opening and closing tags, not whether or not the syntax of HTML
allowed a particular element to be inside another particular element
type). Or rather, that was the original intent, but folks have been
interpreting it differently/away from the original meaning, causing
inconsistency anyway.

> Working with developers, this one needed the least amount of
> explaining or analysis.

But also, it then led to "so how does the fact that I have, say, a <div>
inside a <button> actually affect accessibility" type discussions, where
you ended up having to concede that ok, actually, this one doesn't
really have any impact, but...just do it.

> Also this means there's inconsistency in where people pin down use of
> ARIA, is it 4.1.2 or 1.3.1 or something else. If the issue is caused
> by invalid ARIA markup you could just tie it directly to 4.1.1.

Inconsistency came though because then you either reported it in 4.1.1,
or in whichever SC it actually manifested itself, or in both. Removing
4.1.1 actually makes it hopefully more consistent.

> In terms of issues not necessarily covered by other SCs the one I hvae
> the hardest time tying down is interactive elements nested in links.
> You can focus them, typically in the correct focus order.

I'd argue that focus order is not correct/logical if one is nested
inside the other. That'd be my first port of call for where something
like that fails.

Followed by looking at the keyboard behaviour when activating
things...unless the devs have suppressed bubbling of the event, it
likely ends up causing issues for keyboard users where it triggers
*both* the nested element and the outer link.

Then, as mentioned, the fact that nested interactive elements can end up
with their actual roles/etc overridden, which then yes is a 4.1.2 issue.

P
--
Patrick H. Lauke

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