Restrict ARIA role="text" to <img>

[richschwer]

In the ARIA API mappings meetings everyone was concerned about having role="text" be applied to content other than text as people could put a link in the middle of say a span of text which would be a real problem. The group agreed that the role of "text" should be restricted by the host language to only be used on images for now.

Per the conversation Steve F. and I had please restrict the role of text to only being applied to

[jnurthen]

I'm assuming it will also be allowed on div and span (as shown in the examples in the aria spec)

[richschwer]

no. We are going to limit to images because someone can put a link in the middle of the span.

[jnurthen]

Does someone have an action on the aria spec then?

On Feb 23, 2016, at 09:51, Richard Schwerdtfeger notifications@github.com wrote:

no. We are going to limit to images because someone can put a link in the middle of the span.

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Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub.

[jnurthen]

I mean - doesn't this essentially make the text role useless..... The only benefit it has with this new conformance requirement is allow someone to prevent a screen reader from saying the word "graphic".

[richschwer]

no. the text role was for images of text. The only other option would be to do the following which is to make an attribute called aria-text which can only be applied to images. This way you could create a similar restriction in HTML but also do the following:
<span role="img" aria-text="true" aria-label="5 stars">*****</a>

Again, what happens if someone puts a link in there?

You can propose that to the group.

[klown]

@jnurthen

Does someone have an action on the aria spec then?

https://www.w3.org/WAI/ARIA/track/actions/2023

[stevefaulkner]

Thinking about this a little more we could restrict any container elements
with role=text to only non interactive descendants:

Eg

This restriction is already used in HTML for a number of elements. This
would provide some more flexibility, while constraining the children of
role=text to the desired element types.

On Tuesday, 23 February 2016, Joseph Scheuhammer notifications@github.com
wrote:

@jnurthen https://github.com/jnurthen

Does someone have an action on the aria spec then?

https://www.w3.org/WAI/ARIA/track/actions/2023

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Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub
#26 (comment).

Regards

SteveF
Current Standards Work @w3c
http://www.paciellogroup.com/blog/2015/03/current-standards-work-at-w3c/

[klown]

Thinking about this a little more we could restrict any container elements with role=text to only non interactive descendants

FYI:
https://www.w3.org/WAI/ARIA/track/issues/1011

[chaals]

There is a real issue with making it purely text. ASCII art is still with us:

The following is found in the HTML spec source code:

████████ ████████  ████ ████████ ████ ██    ██  ██████
██       ██     ██  ██     ██     ██  ███   ██ ██    ██
██       ██     ██  ██     ██     ██  ████  ██ ██
██████   ██     ██  ██     ██     ██  ██ ██ ██ ██   ████
██       ██     ██  ██     ██     ██  ██  ████ ██    ██
██       ██     ██  ██     ██     ██  ██   ███ ██    ██
████████ ████████  ████    ██    ████ ██    ██  ██████

(Admittedly much to my distaste).

I think we need something more than a pure img solution if we're going to do this.

In HTML, img is already represented, textually, by the content of the alt attribute.

[chaals]

The link case is analagous to having an image map. We need to define some magic (blergh) that handles the case, probably by decalring that anything interactive inside the label is treated as a map. But I suspect this isn't as hard as it might seem. Especially if we don't want to make ARIA more generally useful.

[cookiecrook]

I object to limiting the authoring use. That's an easy spec solution but it won't work in practice, and will be too limiting of legitimate cases. For the spec, it's sufficient to have the author SHOULD NOT requirements. This will allow validators to throw warnings.

You could even add a requirement that any interactive control inside an element with role="text" will invalidate the containing text role. Authors legitimately wishing to flatten these contained interactive nodes would need to add an explicit role="none"... For example:

<div role="text">Still an <a href="#">interactive link</a> because of the author error.</div>
<div role="text"><a href="#" role="none">Flattened text</a> because of the explicit role.</div>

Rather than limiting an otherwise useful API, resolve this with UA implementation requirements for anticipated authoring mistakes.

[richschwer]

The issue we all had is that even if role="none" is applied the link does not go away. The entire API mapping team felt very uncomfortable with this.

[cookiecrook]

The link doesn't go away if you apply aria-hidden to the entire page either.

[richschwer]

but it makes a mess of things when you are trying to do text api conversion and you have a link that does not belong there.

[richschwer]

btw. I do not like aria-hidden.