Use of inclusive language at the core level

[gurooprasad]

Currently, we have the words like "disabled" used in the ARIA and HTML attributes. So while discussing/communicating the issues related to such attributes will lead to an unavoidable situation of using the word "disabled" state by engineers working on the solution. To avoid such scenarios from happening, we should rename the attributes to exclude those words. For example, "aria-disabled" can be renamed something like "aria-inactive."
Additionally, the WCAG success criteria documentation references the word "disabled", which should be rephrased.

[bruce-usab]

That is an interesting observation @gurooprasad but components being disabled comes from the earliest days of programming. While the genesis of the term is not pejorative, I do understand your point. Regardless, WAI-ARIA is not in scope for for the folks working on WCAG3.

From the FAQ, it is not clear to me if WAI-ARIA is under active development. From the spec, the definition is clear that the attribute is not for PWD. OTOH, why the attribute could not have been aria-inactive instead, I cannot say. I would surmise that such a choice would have had introduced a different set of ambiguities.

[gurooprasad]

@bruce-usab Thanks for sharing your thoughts. To provide backward compatibility, the newly rephrased attributes should be added by keeping the old ones. Any new enhancements or support by assistive technology should be done for newly phrased attributes only. That way, if someone wants to use new enhancements, they should adopt the new naming conventions or they can still stick to the old attributes with existing abilities.
Also, my request is also to consider the W3C WCAG documentation as well. So just wanted to make it clear that this request also asks for the changes in the documentation along with the changes in attributes (if possible). I understand, it won't be the straight forward change. But we have to start somewhere by making some gradual changes.

[bruce-usab]

@gurooprasad the three short paragraphs above this bookmark in the WAI ARIA spec describes how to comment on WAI ARIA. I really do not think that WAI ARIA is in scope for WCAG3.

[gurooprasad]

@bruce-usab thank you. I will log that separately. Other documentation observations can be tracked here.

[lauracarlson]

Thank you for your comment. Project members are working on your comment. You may see discussion in the comment thread and we may ask for additional information as we work on it. We will mark the official response when we are finished and close the issue.

[alastc]

See also w3c/aria#1435

[awkawk]

Proposed response:
The Working Group is open to this change but feels that it is important for the solution to be identified at the W3C org level and then changes can be rolled out in a coordinated way in order to minimize confusion. We will raise this issue with W3C Management in conjunction with the discussion around w3c/aria#1435, close this issue, and once a clear direction is provided from the W3C can address the issue.