W3C

– DRAFT –
ARIA WG

12 May 2022

Attendees

Present
jamesn, MarkMcCarthy, melsumner, scotto, spectranaut
Regrets
AaronLeventhal, BryanGaraventa, HarrisSchneiderman, MarkMcCarthy, SarahHigley
Chair
spectranaut
Scribe
jamesn

Meeting minutes

New Issue Triage

<scotto> issue 1: https://github.com/w3c/html-aam/issues/404 for future discussion

<scotto> issue 2: https://github.com/w3c/aria/issues/1739

<scotto> issue 3: https://github.com/w3c/html-aam/issues/403

New PR Triage

<scotto> https://github.com/w3c/aria/pull/1740 - cleaning up associationlist proposal. PR in progress. Some review has happened so far

<scotto> jamesn: trying to clean up based on previous feedback and including listitemvalue,key and regular list items needs more thought

<scotto> valerie: https://github.com/w3c/aria/pull/1738 is next

"<p class="note">The specification does not currently define IDL attributes for ARIA content attributes of types ID reference or ID reference list. Naming of these IDL attributes is being <a href="https://github.com/whatwg/html/issues/3515">discussed</a> and may not follow the rules above.</p>"

<scotto> next: https://github.com/w3c/core-aam/pull/117

<scotto> this was assigned for further review.

Deep Dive planning

<scotto> any deep dives?

<scotto> jamesn: no meeting next week, so no deep dive

<scotto> valerie: suggestions? if not now, email us!

TPAC 2022 Survey

<scotto> valerie: please fill out the survey in the email i sent regarding if you will come to tpac in person

<scotto> valerie: you can still participate if you can't travel. 2 questions only in the survey!

<scotto> jamesn: 9 responses so far

<scotto> "fine"

Further updates to caption role definition

scotto: per the issue (#1703) I raised the question if the placement of the caption element is meaningful

scotto: we were firstly trying to make parity with HTML caption and their nesting. but now we are not doing anything with name by encapsulation and someone could use this anywhere and reference with aria-labelledby or describedby

scotto: does it matter where it is placed?

scotto: do we relax that restriction

melsumner: as a tooling author i like restrictions

matt: not sure I understand the rule

scotto: if you want to provide a caption for the table then it must be the first descendant

scotto: captions have to be in a very particular position

matt: what are the rules on what elements can have role caption?

matt: if someone puts THEAD and TH and puts role caption on a TH

scotto: right now there are no rules written

matt: in an in-between spot where the new roles are being ported over to aria in HTML

scotto: the current table roles indicate that very specific roles are allowed

matt: there are things forbidding

scotto: this is only really relevant when doing a custom ARIA table right now

<MarkMcCarthy> jamesn: would it be useful to include the caption outside the table?

<MarkMcCarthy_> matt_king: I thought if aria-desccribed by was on table it got mapped to caption?

<MarkMcCarthy_> jamesn: yes, but it isn't annouced as a caption

<MarkMcCarthy_> matt_king: they aren't called captions INSIDE a table either

<MarkMcCarthy_> matt_king: this is kind of where we ended up with tooltip - basically, is there a need to identify it and explictly call it out? it'll add lots of verbosity

<MarkMcCarthy_> matt_king: you'll hear lots of things like "caption describing [the table on the page]"

<MarkMcCarthy_> jamesn: wouldn't that be good? So you know it's coming?

<MarkMcCarthy_> matt_king: hard to say, sounds noisy

scotto: does allow for caption in a table that has an automatic mapping to name a table - similar to legend and fieldset. Allows a caption to be a child of a group - which is important for the new selectmenu stuff going on

matt: we shouldn't be trying to use aria to fix styling problems.

matt: people sometimes use aria to style things the way they want.

<MarkMcCarthy_> jamesn: struggling to understand the benefit of NOT allowing it elsewhere

<MarkMcCarthy_> jamesn: what pollution are you worried about?

<MarkMcCarthy_> matt: worried about it not being useful, and losing some of it's proximity benefits

<MarkMcCarthy_> matt: e.g. if it's left in the table, the relationship is implicit

<MarkMcCarthy_> spectranaut: i'm thinking kind of the same a matt, at this point

<MarkMcCarthy_> scotto: maybe it should stay as it is, for all of these reasons. it's a SHOULD right now, so maybe it allows for the odd one-off use cases

matt: there is no rendered description for table

scotto: obsolete summary - or title

matt: very common for an aria-labelledby to point to something outside the table

matt: wondering why we have role caption

scotto: figcaption will be a aria-details relationship

scotto: will not perform the same naming function

matt: only figcaption with figure

matt: where else can you use caption

scotto: proposal is that caption can name an optiongroup in the selectmenu

matt: aria-labelledby would be an equivalent there

scotto: there is utility here - as the only way to mark that up is putting a group in a div and hiding it

melsumner: do you need captions for that?

cyns: also has a platform API mapping

cyns: AT could choose to use that

jamesn: in practices use role=presentation

jamesn: probably gets read in virtual cursor

melsumner: one of the comments jamesn made - do we have a list of things that we have worked on but are not priorities for browser developers

melsumner: where would I find these things

<MarkMcCarthy_> jamesn: things like spec language etc. that we don't have agreement on from browser implementers?

<MarkMcCarthy_> melsumner: yes

<MarkMcCarthy_> jamesn: we hvae things on the wiki that have been postponed to 1.4, that's basically the only place. or the editors draft

<MarkMcCarthy_> jamesn: issue is that there's only a handful of people that implement these things - more people won't necessarily help

<MarkMcCarthy_> jamesn: everyone is just.. busy

Minutes manually created (not a transcript), formatted by scribe.perl version 185 (Thu Dec 2 18:51:55 2021 UTC).

Diagnostics

Maybe present: cyns, matt