Trim whitespace from computed accessible name/description

[AlexLloyd0]

Should whitespace be trimmed from the returned accessible name or description? e.g.

<button aria-label=" Hello world ">Hi</button>

My reading of the spec is that the accessible name should be " Hello world ", but browsers expose it as "Hello world", which is more logical to me. Possibly related to #16

[jnurthen]

From 2021/06/03 meeting:
msumner: thinks we should trim whitespace, there are quirks where not doing that breaks stuff. In FF spaces in options have caused an issue

jamesn: do we mean at the end of the calculation or during it?

msumner: what to implementers think?

sarah_higley: would advocate for at the end

jcraig: there was some discussion about collapsing multiple whitespace.. is this trimming at the end or ANY whitespace?

jcraig: we need to be careful about inadvertently adding whitespace that the author did not intend

joanie: thinks the example of starting and ending with a space is sub-optimal authoring, but we should not trim

msumner: the spaces may be unintentional, e.g. a side-effect of a CMS

jamesn: there are 9 open acc name whitespace issues, this would be the 10th

msumner: will look at this set of issues and categorize them

[joanmarie]

joanie: thinks the example of starting and ending with a space is sub-optimal authoring, but we should not trim

To be clear: Joanie thinks other trimming is good (e.g. at the end of calculation, and when it is NOT whitespace intentionally added by the author like in the opening report)

[cookiecrook]

Agenda+ since this is coming up in the context of the Interop Accessibility Focus Area

[cookiecrook]

@w3c/aria-editors please add new milestone for 2024... Need to resolve this for Interop 2024 so we don't have to pull out the WPT tests from the Accessibility Focus Area.

[cookiecrook]

FWIW, we did remove/change the nbsp tests in WPT, because the ARIA spec resolved on ASCII whitespace, which does not include non-breaking space.

[spectranaut]

Discussed in https://www.w3.org/2024/05/09-aria-minutes.html#t08
Decision to deep dive all accname whitespace issues after @MelSumner does a review/categorizing of them