ARIA Authoring Practices Guide patterns and web-features

[tidoust]

One of the goals of the ARIA and Assistive Technologies Community Group is to help web developers understand the current state of support for WAI-ARIA by assistive technologies. The group develops an ARIA Authoring Practices Guide (APG) which "describes how to apply accessibility semantics to common design patterns and widgets".

The patterns are user interface patterns such as accordion, breadcrumb, combobox, tabs or tree view. The group develops examples for each of these patterns, and tests to measure assistive technology support for the examples. For an example, see the Radio Group Example Using aria-activedescendant and note the Assistive Technology Support table near the end of the page.

@lolaodelola and @boazsender are currently exploring how best to capture the support data (BCD? web-features?) so that other projects may reuse it as well. I'm creating this (somewhat open-ended) issue as a way to set the context and collect thoughts from a web-features perspective.

A first question perhaps worth exploring: Is web-features a good place to catalog the patterns themselves? If so, how we would represent them? Some of the patterns directly map to HTML elements and BCD keys (e.g., Dialog (Modal)) but are used in a more conceptual sense in the guide, wile others do not seem easy to map to a set of BCD keys, such as the Window splitter pattern. If web-features does not seem a good place for the patterns, what data would we be interested in gathering, e.g., to help with #498.

[foolip]

Is the goal to show information about browser and AT support directly in the APG, on pages like https://www.w3.org/WAI/ARIA/apg/patterns/dialog-modal/?

Is there data about AT support to use for this? I know about https://a11ysupport.io/, but does it have all the data that would be needed?

[boazsender]

We are currently capturing data about pattern support in that https://aria-at.w3.org project, and displaying it when available on APG example pages, for example: https://www.w3.org/WAI/ARIA/apg/patterns/button/examples/button/#assistivetechnologysupport

We're in the process of testing all of the patterns, and are continuing to add these support tables on pattern example pages.

To the broader question about including this kind of data in BCD or web features, I think this conversation falls in the UI components area. Is there a web feature category for that? Would we want to expand that beyond the standard library of html/form ui to include the ecosystem of component library ui? Open UI is tracking a lot of this, and aria-at is testing the AT support of these patterns. I'm not quite sure what the right approach is here, but interested to discuss more.

I'm curious what @gregwhitworth and the Open UI community have to say about this.