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Bug 13265 - Should disallow <a> elements to be made into buttons, checkboxes, radio buttons, tabs, or tree items, since those are all semantic abuse
Summary: Should disallow <a> elements to be made into buttons, checkboxes, radio butto...
Status: RESOLVED FIXED
Alias: None
Product: HTML WG
Classification: Unclassified
Component: LC1 HTML5 spec (show other bugs)
Version: unspecified
Hardware: Other other
: P3 normal
Target Milestone: ---
Assignee: Ian 'Hixie' Hickson
QA Contact: HTML WG Bugzilla archive list
URL: http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/...
Whiteboard:
Keywords: a11y
Depends on:
Blocks:
 
Reported: 2011-07-15 00:08 UTC by contributor
Modified: 2011-10-02 05:12 UTC (History)
9 users (show)

See Also:

Attachments

Description contributor 2011-07-15 00:08:54 UTC 
Specification: http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/complete.html
Multipage: http://www.whatwg.org/C#table-aria-weak
Complete: http://www.whatwg.org/c#table-aria-weak

Comment:
Should disallow <a> elements to be made into buttons, checkboxes, radio
buttons, tabs, or tree items, since those are all semantic abuse

Posted from: 216.239.45.4 by ian@hixie.ch
User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_5_8) AppleWebKit/535.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/14.0.803.0 Safari/535.1
Comment 1 Henri Sivonen 2011-07-18 12:46:53 UTC 
EDITOR'S RESPONSE: This is an Editor's Response to your comment. If you are
satisfied with this response, please change the state of this bug to CLOSED. If
you have additional information and would like the editor to reconsider, please
reopen this bug. If you would like to escalate the issue to the full HTML
Working Group, please add the TrackerRequest keyword to this bug, and suggest
title and text for the tracker issue; or you may create a tracker issue
yourself, if you are able to do so. For more details, see this document:
   http://dev.w3.org/html5/decision-policy/decision-policy.html

Status: Rejected
Change Description: no spec change
Rationale: It is assumed that semantic abuse exists regardless of ARIA and the whole point of ARIA is to make semantic abuse accessible as an afterthought. If semantic abuse revealed by ARIA were considered an error, it's likely that enough authors would remove ARIA than to remove the semantic abuse that it would be a problem.
Comment 2 Michael[tm] Smith 2011-08-04 05:01:18 UTC 
mass-moved component to LC1
Comment 3 Ian 'Hixie' Hickson 2011-10-02 05:12:27 UTC 
That isn't the point of ARIA. ARIA is primarily for developers creating custom widgets and other web application components. It allows authors to provide accessibility hooks for ATs in cases where the user agent would otherwise have nothing useful to provide. It is not intended for use by authors who are trying to convey the very semantics that HTML can already convey.

In any case, having an AT label a link as being a button actually hurts accessibility, it doesn't improve it, as it makes it impossible for the user to understand instructions. For example, if they visit a page that has a link labeled as role=button, and they read instructions telling them to click on the link, they would not be able to find it, as they would be looking for a link and not a button. Similarly, labeling an interactive control such as a link as being a tree item would harm accessibility, as it would hide from the user the fact that the link could be activated and followed.

Ergo, I am reopening this bug.

EDITOR'S RESPONSE: This is an Editor's Response to your comment. If you are satisfied with this response, please change the state of this bug to CLOSED. If you have additional information and would like the editor to reconsider, please reopen this bug. If you would like to escalate the issue to the full HTML Working Group, please add the TrackerRequest keyword to this bug, and suggest title and text for the tracker issue; or you may create a tracker issue yourself, if you are able to do so. For more details, see this document:
   http://dev.w3.org/html5/decision-policy/decision-policy.html

Status: Partially Accepted
Change Description: see diff given below
Rationale: However, the initial request is not entirely correct either. It does, to some extent, make sense for links to be used as tabs. So I've left that as conforming.
Comment 4 contributor 2011-10-02 05:12:54 UTC 
Checked in as WHATWG revision r6610.
Check-in comment: Disallow some combinations that would indicate element misuse.
http://html5.org/tools/web-apps-tracker?from=6609&to=6610