Escalating ARIA API surface to secure multimodality

[zbraniecki]

Describe your concern

Historically, ARIA has been focused on securing the needs of accessibility domain for W3C APIs. Serendipitously it also has been building all the building blocks required to extend the W3C API surface to the needs of non-GUI modalities such as VUI (Voice User Interface).

We are now at the junction point as my organization is investing in shaping our UI paradigms after W3C and at the same time target them for multi-modal UIs, with the focus on GUI+VUI mix.

We starts seeing cases where our VUI needs, historically supplied by proprietary attributes, are matching 1-1 to what ARIA has been introducing for accessibility needs.

The argument I am making here is that by adding additional incentives for developers to use the API surface of ARIA, we make it easier to increase adoption of ARIA and broadening the scope of UIs that are truly accessible.

The limitation we're encountering is that historically the APIs have been explicitly called out as accessibility only, with many cases where the attributes are even prefixed with the word accessibility to purpose them for that.

I understand that this is a bold ask, but could ARIA WG consider rephrasing the scope to cover VUI needs and rethink the naming recommended naming schemes to capture the multimodal value of ARIA attributes?

For example, instead of accessibilityPosInSet, an attribute like semanticPosInSet would capture all audiences of such attribute.
We could also maintain the ariaPosInSet and get creative in extending the meaning of aria to broaden it to all audiences of non-GUI uses. Examples:

• Ambient Rich Internet Applications
• Adaptive Rich Internet Applications
• All-Inclusive Rich Internet Applications
• Augmented Rich Internet Applications
• Agile Rich Internet Applications

With that secured, we could keep expanding aria* API surface capturing multi-modal needs and broadening the adoption of the surface needed for accessibility agents with the use cases of capturing the VUIs.

Please, let me know if this is the right place to raise this topic and whether there has been a discussion about it before somewhere else.

[pkra]

This was briefly discussed during issue triage on May 25, cf. https://www.w3.org/2023/05/25-aria-minutes.html#t01

minutes excerpt

JamesN: There is already precedent in using ARIA stuff for other than accessibility
Scott: Seems like a very weird change. We can create synonyms for things, otherwise that's going to break stuff
Peter: IF HTML had something posinset I would be happy. Sure there are properties that should be more general but there's where HTML comes
JamesN: It may not be HTML though
... Potentially they are creating something and that's why they want to reuse what we already have in here
Peter: We'd need a Deep Dive
JamesN: Anyone want to contact this person and find out more?
JamesN: Seems like a Deep Dive / TPAC conversation
Peter: Even a TAG conversation

The issue was labeled deep-dive which seems like a good first step [deep dive calls are for discussing complex topics, separately from the weekly WG call).

If that sounds interesting @zbraniecki, could you ping the chairs (@jnurthen @spectranaut) with some contact information to coordinate?

[jnurthen]

closing as we haven't heard back from filer.. Please reopen if you want to progress this.