RE: new landmark html elements

Hi David,
I have discussed this with some people here at FS and to summarize we
would like all these elements to have role of section unless a more
specific role is available (i.e., footer and header).  We do use the tag
object attribute so as long as this is set correctly, that is sufficient
to identify these for us.
I have put comments in-line below to address the separate questions.
Thanks,
Brett
 

-----Original Message-----
From: David Bolter [mailto:[email protected]] 
Sent: Tuesday, October 19, 2010 12:20 PM
To: [email protected]
Subject: new landmark html elements

  Hi all,

Note: I've sent this message to the public mozilla accessibility list
but also have bcc'ed some vendors in case they are not on this list.

We want to hear from AT developers/vendors on how best we can expose
some new types of html element that are similar to ARIA landmarks.

<nav>
<header>
<footer>
<article>

Currently we expose these as paragraphs, but we would like users to be
able to take advantage of them as landmarks for easy navigation etc. 
Currently we expose them as paragraphs, and the only information that
indicates what they really are is the 'tag' object attribute. E.g. 
tag:FOOTER. I have a few relation questions:

1. Do you use the 'tag' object attribute, and when?

FS does use this to identify elements if no other identifying
information is available.  Ideally we could use the role first unless
the element has a role of section in which case we could fall back to
the tag.

2. Do you think tag is correct and sufficient for exposing html landmark
elements?

3. Do you think we should expose header with the IA2 header role?

Definitely.

4. Do you think we should expose footer with the IA2 footer role?

Definitely.

5. We are reluctant to do this, but we could pretend these elements are
ARIA landmarks and expose xml-roles object attributes, e.g. 
xml-roles:footer. Thoughts?


6. Should we expose all these as sections and give the element name as
the role string for MSAA (the variant cheat).

Please don't do this.  The <nav> and <article> should be
IA2_ROLE_SECTION and the header and footer should have their correct
roles.

7. Something else?

The related html spec is here:
http://dev.w3.org/html5/spec/sections.html

The related bug is here:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=593368

Thanks!

David