separator role splits list in Firefox

[stevefaulkner]

In a bug filed on the JAWS tracker: JAWS treats menu items after a separator as a different menu group It was reported that use of a separator in a menu resulted in JAWS (and NVDA) treating the menu items before and after the separator as separate sets. in investigating this I found that it was not an issue with JAWS, but an effect that use of separator has in Firefox (posinset and setsize properties indicate 2 sets of 4 in the test case). This is not reflected in the Chrome implementation or reportedly in Safari.

Is the Firefox behaviour correct?

[joanmarie]

I think this is either an Authoring Practices question or an ARIA question. Core-AAM merely says how to map the already-determined posinset and setsize to platforms.

[joanmarie]

Ah, I see why you filed it against Core-AAM. That's where the group-position fallback stuff is.

We've been moving that over to the ARIA spec when it is not platform-specific stuff. But for now, I get it. Sorry for the noise.

[joanmarie]

Authors are expected to use a named group to create more than one distinct set of items within a menu. Therefore, Firefox's behavior is incorrect, and we need to update the spec language accordingly.