Re: new landmark html elements

David Bolter <[email protected]> Wed, 20 Oct 2010 11:20:30 -0400
Newsgroups gmane.comp.mozilla.accessibility
Message-ID <[email protected]>
Thanks for the feedback Brett!

(Note to readers, Jamie has put his thoughts on the bug report.)

It sounds like we will expose the header and footer with their matching 
IA2 roles. We will continue to expose the tag attribute. We're still 
considering whether to additionally, add an landmark attribute, or 
re-purpose the xml-roles attribute.

Cheers,
David

On 20/10/10 10:52 AM, Brett Lewis wrote:
> 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