W3C

– DRAFT –
ARIA WG

04 August 2022

Attendees

Present
Aaron_Leventhal, arigilmore, CurtBellew, jaunita_george, jcraig, MarkMcCarthy, MichaelC, sarah_h Robert_Perez arigilmore prka spectranaut, scotto, siri_
Regrets
-
Chair
ValerieYoung
Scribe
jcraig, prka

Meeting minutes

New Issue Triage

spectranaut: scribing is fun!

New PR Triage

Deep Dive planning

Deep Dive next week is about popups.

TPAC Agenda - add tag F2FCandidate by August 16th

Siri: Who will attend TPAC

spectranaut MichaelC JamesN Bryan and jcraig will attend in person.... possibly Siri

CurtBellew can only attend remotely

spectranaut: any remotes?

Scott, mark, Peter, and Jaunita

spectranaut: GitHub tag created for F2F candidates. please add. Will discuss on the 16th

"Whitespace characters" underspecified

spectranaut: this is a blocking issue for 1.2

JamesN researched; discovered this was a formal decision by ARIA in 2016?

<spectranaut> 2016 decision on aria-roledescription: https://www.w3.org/WAI/ARIA/track/actions/2092

<Cyns> Partial regrets, hoping to join later

What def of whitespace is being used in WebKit?

jcraig: will look it up

spectranaut: how to triage since this is blocking 1.2 and this was a formal decision previously

jcraig: motion to triage to 1.3 since this is late in 1.2

scotto: NVDA will suppress role descriptions using this technique on Windows; JAWS ignores and speaks it anyway

aaron: my concern is that considering all the ways authors can go wrong will be a pain for us.

jcraig: right. I don't see how it blocks 1.2

aaron: could just say "space" and figure out in 1.3

jcraig: we still need to verify implementations

aaron: we're currently implementing it

jcraig: underspecified leaves potential for implementers to do what they think best in the meantime

aaron: I'm mainly concerned about overcomplicating the code.
… were implementors invovled in the original decision?
… feels like not

spectranaut: if AT can still decide what to do (since it's exposed separately), then there's no real loss.
… I'm moved by the argument that it's an author error and AT can still decide what to do with it
… but we want to focus on getting 1.2 out the door.
… we should work out where else we refer to whitespace in our specs.
… e.g., aria-braille

aaron: Firefox on Mac seems to only check length 0.

spectranaut: in ARIA spec, whitespace is only mentioned in braille props.

scott: but there must be something in, e.g., accname.

jcraig: what if role=button and roleDescription is empty string.
… implementation might want to invalidate use of role.
… e.g., if it's not focusable.

aaron: if we find out safari and firefox just check empty string, can we change the spec?

michael: it would be good to match both specs. but also good to put changes until later

spectranaut: so we need to know what webkit does.
… and work on braille props.

pkra: braille props were following the regular ones.
… so I'd suggest to keep doing that

spectranaut: makes sense.

jcraig: that's probably fine

spectranaut: so perhaps we can decide on the empty string. At least we should not slow down the release of 1.2
… of aria

spectranaut: how about a formal decision to change it to empty string.

aaron: +1 we'd have to update Chrome.

scott: this way, we're not cutting off the discussion for later.
… I'm concerned about people actively suppressing roles

spectranaut: I'll want jnurthen and Firefox's opinion on this.

aaron: james teh commented on the issue

spectranaut: right, he wrote it sounds like an authoring error.

spectranaut: I'll talk to jnurthen and suggest a formal decision on the mailing list.

1.3 triage

spectranaut: first step: going through all issues in the milestone assigned to you.
… tag them with a few different tags as per my email.
… all: reminder to take a look

Minutes manually created (not a transcript), formatted by scribe.perl version 192 (Tue Jun 28 16:55:30 2022 UTC).

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Maybe present: aaron, michael, pkra, scott, Siri, spectranaut