aria-brailleroledescription example conflicts with recommended authoring practices

[cookiecrook]

aria-brailleroledescription contains this example:

The following example shows the use of aria-brailleroledescription to indicate that a button's description has a particular braille contraction.

EXAMPLE 18

<button aria-roledescription="planet" aria-brailleroledescription="pln" id="jupiter">
<img alt="jupiter" src="images/jupiter.jpg"/>
</button>

In the previous example, a braille display may display "pln Jupiter" in Braille rather than the verbose "planet Jupiter".

This conflicts authoring advice to avoid using custom role descriptions on interactive elements like buttons... Because users know they can activate a button... They may not know they can activate a "planet." The recommendation is to avoid using this on anything but container roles. Though the button case is not prohibited, we shouldn't use it as the best example.

I'd suggest using an updated version of the "slide" example from aria-roledescription.

[sinabahram]

Two quick responses on this.

1: This is not a Braille contraction. It is simply an abbreviation or shortening, but it is not a grade 2 contraction representing planet. I don't think that's what you meant, but since "Braille contraction" means something specific, I didn't want folks conflating those concepts.

2: I disagree that roledescription should not be used on interactive elements. For sure, it can be abused, but if you are making a game where you can select which planets to visit with your starship, especially with appropriate descriptions about "activate to select planet", this can not only be a good experience, but a downright lovely experience. It would be nice to not have our advice prevent authors from creating enjoyable experiences for their users. Collapsing dozens of design decisions down into "button" seems rather unfair/unequitable to me.

Furthermore, in educational contexts, such as counting exercises from folks like ETS and other testing bodies, they may wish to have younger kids to select 5 beans and add them to their bag of beans as a math exercise (one of the original impetuses for roledescription actually). Slapping a roledescription of bag on an unordered list with bean as the roledescription on some buttons sounds a heck of a lot better to me than forcing a 8 year old kid to have to deal with buttons or lists or any of that stuff that blind folks have to listen to on a daily basis.

[cookiecrook]

Agreed, the ETS example is why it should not be prohibited, but it would not be ideal to have well-intentioned web devs overusing these attrs on general controls.

Nice catch on the misuse of the term "contraction"... I think "abbreviation" should work.

[sinabahram]

So, are we still preventing roledescription on interactive elements? Because if so, I'd like that changed. Let me know what needs to be done there, please.

[cookiecrook]

There is/was a line preventing that on any element without an implicit ARIA role semantic, but there seemed to be consensus in Issue #500 for removing that, so I'm working on PR #1408, but I just noticed it's incomplete.

There is still a line preventing use of role description on elements where the role prohibits use of the attribute. Currently that is only prohibited on the generic role, which seems reasonable to me.