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Results of Questionnaire Call for Consensus: approaches to aria-roledescription

The results of this questionnaire are available to anybody.

This questionnaire was open from 2016-07-07 to 2016-07-14.

14 answers have been received.

Jump to results for question:

  1. Null aria-roledescription treated as if it were not specified and move ARIA text role to ARIA 2.0
  2. Null aria-roledescription suppresses role announcement on img role only and move ARIA text role to ARIA 2.0
  3. Comments

1. Null aria-roledescription treated as if it were not specified and move ARIA text role to ARIA 2.0

See the proposed definition for null roledescription ignored or the diff version for null roledescription ignored.

Summary

ChoiceAll responders
Results
yes 4
no 1
concur 8
abstain 1

Details

Responder Null aria-roledescription treated as if it were not specified and move ARIA text role to ARIA 2.0
Joanmarie Diggs concur
Birkir Gunnarsson concur
Stefan Schnabel yes
Léonie Watson yes
Richard Schwerdtfeger concur
Steve Faulkner concur
Fred Esch concur
Matthew King yes
Jason Kiss concur
Cynthia Shelly yes
Jason White concur
Joseph Scheuhammer concur
James Craig abstain
James Nurthen no

2. Null aria-roledescription suppresses role announcement on img role only and move ARIA text role to ARIA 2.0

In this option, authors could use the img role with null aria-roledescription and an aria-label to provide text equivalent without an apparent role. See the proposed definition for null roledescription on img or the diff version for for null roledescription on img.

Summary

ChoiceAll responders
Results
yes 3
no 5
concur 6
abstain

Details

Responder Null aria-roledescription suppresses role announcement on img role only and move ARIA text role to ARIA 2.0
Joanmarie Diggs concur
Birkir Gunnarsson no
Stefan Schnabel yes
Léonie Watson no
Richard Schwerdtfeger concur
Steve Faulkner concur
Fred Esch concur
Matthew King no
Jason Kiss no
Cynthia Shelly concur
Jason White no
Joseph Scheuhammer concur
James Craig yes
James Nurthen yes

3. Comments

If you have any additional comments beyond your vote above, provide them here.

Details

Responder Comments
Joanmarie Diggs I do wish we could have separated out the text+null issue from the new normative statements about AT behavior. They are, after all, independent issues.

I'm fine with adding text explicitly stating that null roledescription is ignored and moving the ARIA text/static role to 2.0. If we were being asked to evaluate "Option 1" rather than "Option 3," my vote would be "Yes." Similarly, I'm fine with allowing a null roledescription only on images.

The reason I'm voting "Concur" is because I am unsure about the new, and normative, statements about AT behavior. I have to give these changes some more thought. It's not worthy of a "No," however.
Birkir Gunnarsson
Stefan Schnabel http://rawgit.com/w3c/aria/action2092option3/aria/aria.html#aria-roledescription should include a section that handles "null aria-roledescription suppresses role announcement on img role", when respective question passes with Yes
Léonie Watson Would prefer aria-roledescription to be dropped from 1.1, until there has been time to consider the use cases in more detail and find a solution that isn't likely to break more than it will fix.
Richard Schwerdtfeger
Steve Faulkner
Fred Esch
Matthew King Allowing null role description even for images is the type of special case hacking that makes ARIA less robust, more difficult to understand, and risky to use.
Such special case processing would be difficult to justify even if it were solving an urgent problem that is extremely important to people with disabilities.
In this case, the hack is not solving a well defined problem. The primary objective is a minor reduction to screen reader verbosity that many screen reader users believe is actually detremental.
In the rare cases where use of such a hack could be appropriately classified as recasting non-text elements as text, there are other means of achieveing the same effect if it is important to the author.
Jason Kiss
Cynthia Shelly
Jason White I think it would be better to allow a value consisting only of whitespace to suppress presentation of the role in the user interface, as this would be less likely due to author error than a null value might be. I also strongly object to citing concerns about potential for misuse as a good reason for omitting or restricting features in ARIA. I think those concerns (and the people who raise them) are well-intentioned, but ultimately, HTML 5, scripting, SVG and ARIA provide more than ample opportunities for authors to make unwise decisions. The Web community has proceeded in this direction without regard to potential misuses, a situation which restrictions in ARIA would not change, while potentially depriving competent authors of the tools they need to create a better interaction experience for users with disabilities.
I am also unpersuaded that special cases (e.g., null aria-roedescription on image roles) are at all desirable. In this case, the second proposal would complicate the format unnecessarily, place unnecessary restrictions on the use of null aria-roledescription by confining its effect to image roles only, and address only a single documented use case (images of text). I think such hacks should be kept out of the language.
Joseph Scheuhammer
James Craig Clarifying: Move text role to ARIA.next rather than specifically to ARIA 2.0. Otherwise this survey is invalid because it asks two questions for each response. To be accurate, it'd need to ask "Move to 2.0?" as a separate question.

PS. What happens if everyone votes Yes to both questions?
James Nurthen By not allowing an empty roledescription to override the role we are going to end up with authors who want to do this providing even more "creative" hacks such as the one Stefan proposed in the meeting last week or things like aria-roledescription="⇒" which as far as I know isn't read out by any screen readers normally. It will still appear in the accessibility API and the screen reader will still read it.

Trying to prevent authors from doing what they want to seems foolhardy - they will find a way to use the technology in order to create the result they need. However, by preventing them using sane "hacks" like aria-roledescription="" you will force them to use crazy hacks.

More details on responses

  • Joanmarie Diggs: last responded on 8, July 2016 at 14:31 (UTC)
  • Birkir Gunnarsson: last responded on 8, July 2016 at 14:36 (UTC)
  • Stefan Schnabel: last responded on 8, July 2016 at 14:39 (UTC)
  • Léonie Watson: last responded on 8, July 2016 at 14:41 (UTC)
  • Richard Schwerdtfeger: last responded on 8, July 2016 at 14:56 (UTC)
  • Steve Faulkner: last responded on 8, July 2016 at 16:19 (UTC)
  • Fred Esch: last responded on 8, July 2016 at 17:43 (UTC)
  • Matthew King: last responded on 8, July 2016 at 19:28 (UTC)
  • Jason Kiss: last responded on 11, July 2016 at 00:30 (UTC)
  • Cynthia Shelly: last responded on 12, July 2016 at 19:07 (UTC)
  • Jason White: last responded on 13, July 2016 at 17:03 (UTC)
  • Joseph Scheuhammer: last responded on 13, July 2016 at 21:03 (UTC)
  • James Craig: last responded on 13, July 2016 at 22:54 (UTC)
  • James Nurthen: last responded on 14, July 2016 at 00:05 (UTC)

Non-responders

The following persons have not answered the questionnaire:

  1. Jon Gunderson
  2. Janina Sajka
  3. Neil Soiffer
  4. Hans Hillen
  5. Dominic Cooney
  6. Boaz Sender
  7. Adrian Roselli
  8. Reinaldo Ferraz
  9. Alexander Surkov
  10. Sina Bahram
  11. Matt Garrish
  12. Peter Krautzberger
  13. Tzviya Siegman
  14. Bryan Garaventa
  15. Charles LaPierre
  16. Zoë Bijl
  17. JaEun Jemma Ku
  18. 骅 杨
  19. Avneesh Singh
  20. Seth Thompson
  21. biao liu
  22. Francis Storr
  23. Jieting Chen
  24. Stanley Hon
  25. Shirisha Gubba
  26. Aaron Leventhal
  27. Mark McCarthy
  28. Glen Gordon
  29. Scott O'Hara
  30. Michael Pennisi
  31. Curt Bellew
  32. Valerie Young
  33. Harris Schneiderman
  34. Isaac Durazo
  35. Daniel Montalvo
  36. Sarah Higley
  37. Mu-An Chiou
  38. Jan Williams
  39. Adam Page
  40. Erika Miguel
  41. Isabel Holdsworth
  42. Greta Krafsig
  43. Alison Maher
  44. Michael Jackson
  45. Melanie Sumner
  46. Sheila Moussavi
  47. Roberto Perez
  48. Brian Liu Xu
  49. Alexander Flenniken
  50. Jaunita George
  51. Michael Goddard
  52. Howard Edwards
  53. Frank Elavsky
  54. Shikha Nikhil Dwivedi
  55. James Teh
  56. Christopher Lane
  57. Michail Yasonik
  58. Mayuri Faldu
  59. Rashmi Garimella
  60. Benjamin Beaudry
  61. Ariella Gilmore
  62. Giacomo Petri
  63. Xiao (Helen) Zhou
  64. Cory Joseph
  65. James Edwards
  66. Trisha Salas
  67. Mario Batušić
  68. Peter Heumader
  69. Sazzad Mahamud
  70. ANDREA CARDONA
  71. Doug Geoffray
  72. Daniel Pöll
  73. Marcelo Paiva
  74. Airing Deng
  75. Sunny Hardasani
  76. Eloisa Guerrero
  77. Keith Cirkel
  78. Jocelyn Tran
  79. Rahim Abdi
  80. Marco Sabidussi
  81. Theo Hale
  82. Summer Jones
  83. Kate Zhao
  84. Rayianna Daniels-Wynn
  85. Raymond Schwartz
  86. Filippo Zorzi
  87. Oliver Habersetzer

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