W3C

– DRAFT –
ARIA Authoring Practices Task Force

20 August 2024

Attendees

Present
Adam_Page_, arigilmore, dmontalvo, howard-e, jugglinmike, Matt_King, OliverH5
Regrets
-
Chair
-
Scribe
jugglinmike

Meeting minutes

Setup and Review Agenda

Matt_King: Any requests for change to agenda?

Matt_King: Hearing none, we'll stick with what we have planned

Matt_King: Next meeting: August 27

Publication planning

Matt_King: Next publication date is September 10

Matt_King: I didn't add Adam_Page_'s current work to this milestone

Matt_King: But if we could land it before TPAC, it would be really useful to have it in APG

Matt_King: Do you think it's realistic for us to get the feedback and etc implemented over the next couple weeks?

Adam_Page_: I think so, yes

dmontalvo: We could handle a release on September 17 if necessary, but any later than that would be tight for TPAC

dmontalvo: Publication PRs should be assigned to a new colleague at the W3C--I will send their contact information out soon

dmontalvo: Shawn will continue to act as a reviewer

Matt_King: Understood

Matt_King: We're going to try to shoot for September 10, but it's good to know we can move it back if necessary

Fix for kbd elements

github: w3c/aria-practices#3093

Matt_King: This is another one of those old patches that needed to be refactored and redone

Matt_King: The changes are simple; just need checking to make sure the search/replace didn't produce any unexpected and undesirable results.

Matt_King: This patch transforms 2- and 3-chord key commands according to how the "kbd" element is intended to be used

Adam_Page_: I can review that

arigilmore: I can review, as well

Matt_King: Great; I'll add you both

Matt_King: I'm not going to add a review checklist like we normally do because this one is so simple

Updating the code guide

Matt_King: OliverH5 is working on implementing the requested changes

OliverH5: My manager would like to know how many hours of labor this will require because I would like to do this "on the clock"

Matt_King: The suggestions that were in the issue are for just this one page, just updating the code guide itself

Matt_King: When it comes to updating the APG to be in line with the code guide, that will be a whole different effort

OliverH5: Ah, now I understand

Matt_King: In this pull request, I took the wiki content and just copied it into a Markdown file in the repository

Matt_King: It's ready for your contribution, OliverH5

Matt_King: Also, a lot of what should be in the CONTRIBUTING.md file is currently in the README.md file. I think I'll leave that for another day, though

Sortable table caption

github: w3c/aria-practices#3072

Matt_King: In the sortable table example, there's a caption on the table. The capture: a phrase, followed by a comma, followed by another phrase

Matt_King: Someone pointed out that the comma is not a very good syntactic structure because the comma is off-screen

Matt_King: So we're removing it in favor of using a space as a separator

Matt_King: At the moment in the patch, though, even though I can observe a space in the code, JAWS appears to be rendering without the space

arigilmore: I haven't had a chance to investigate further since you reported that, though I know there's no problem with VoiceOver. I'll be sure to look in to it with JAWS

Matt_King: I didn't try this in Firefox, actually

Matt_King: Firefox has TWO spaces!

Adam_Page_: I remember a similar issue coming up on a WPT test that I wrote. Something to do with a link or a button, if I recall correctly

Matt_King: This might be a browser bug and no problem with arigilmore's code

arigilmore: Interesting...

Adam_Page_: Reviewing the pull request, now, I can see a space at the beginning of the "span" element

arigilmore: What do you think if I use an HTML entity like " "?

Adam_Page_: I was thinking about that, too; you might also try the "breaking space" entity (although it probably doesn't matter too much because this is off-screen)

Matt_King: Yeah, let's try an entity, arigilmore

Tabs with action buttons

github: w3c/aria-practices#3071

Matt_King: Our very first experimental example

Matt_King: There's a preview link in the first comment on the pull request

Adam_Page_: I was excited about this because I've been following aria-actions since its early days

Adam_Page_: And because I had a use for it during my day-job at Intel a couple years ago

Adam_Page_: I reviewed the issue that's attached to this pull request, and I found your exploration of six possibilties

Adam_Page_: I chose number 4 because that's the most like the one that I'd tried previously

Adam_Page_: Essentially, it was making the additional button inside the tab to be focusable only when the tab itself is focused

Adam_Page_: If you're tabbing through the page, and you arrive on the first tab, but then you hit the arrow key, you'll move focus to one of the unselected tabs

Matt_King: I think this is good for people to play with it and see what they think

Matt_King: I just like that I can arrow across the tabs and the buttons aren't in my way

Matt_King: The one thing I was thinking about when tabbing to that actions button: as a screen reader user, I hear "Carl Anderson tab action buttons menu". I was thinking that, from a labeling perspective, it might be better if it said, "Actions for Carl Anderson menu"

Matt_King: That way, I would only have to hear one word to know the element that I'm on. That would be especially helpful for long tab names, where you would have to wait a while to learn that information

Adam_Page_: That makes sense to me

Adam_Page_: Cognitively, it makes the most sense to lead with the most important piece of information

Adam_Page_: I know aria-labeledby can be dicey with localized content

Adam_Page_: I'm glad that you like that you can use the arrow keys like that. That was a primary motivation for my choice of the fourth alternative

Matt_King: There was also the option of left- and right- arrows moving through the tabs and the down arrow selects

Matt_King: But I'm really curious to learn how people respond to this when they try it out

arigilmore: In Carbon, we have a similar interaction with tabs

Matt_King: So, it's already showing up in design systems working this way. That's good feedback!

Adam_Page_: I also wanted to ask how best to demonstrate the fake operations

Adam_Page_: I didn't know how far to take those kind of "mock operations"

Matt_King: I love the copy-to-clipboard one because it doesn't have to change the state of the page

Matt_King: So what if we only had two actions here, since the idea is only to demonstrate that it's a menu

Matt_King: Implementing "move" is cool, but it's a bunch of complicated code that doesn't really add demonstration value

Matt_King: The "close" one is interesting because people always ask about close e.g. where focus should go

Matt_King: So that might be a good one to do because it answers some accessibility questions

Matt_King: So maybe just "Copy" and "Close", then

dmontalvo: "Close" raises a lot of questions

Matt_King: And I'd like to answer them!

<Adam_Page_> here’s where I landed on this a couple years ago: https://adampage.github.io/a11y_tab_widget/tests/closeable-tabs.html

Matt_King: I was thinking that if you're deleting the first one, then the second one would get focus. If you're deleting the last one, you focus the one that was prior

<arigilmore> looks like carbon has similar functionality for that as well: https://react.carbondesignsystem.com/?path=/story/components-tabs--dismissable

Adam_Page_: Adding this functionality would be relatively easy if I could just modify the existing tabs JavaScript, but would you see that as polluting the existing code?

Matt_King_: I think we should make a copy for tabs-actions.js (or similar) just so we keep the simplest examples with the simplest code

arigilmore: I kind of thought the arrows just meant that, "oh I'm looking down now", so I'm wondering if an ellipsis would work

Adam_Page_: Absolutely; I was trying to re-use a design from elsewhere in the APG (the menu), but i could go either way

Adam_Page_: I might poll some of my colleagues to see if they have input because I had the same intuition as arigilmore

Combobox change event question

github: w3c/aria-practices#3095

Adam_Page_: If I'm understanding correctly, the reporter is using the combobox pattern, but they want an "onchange" event that they would get with a standard "select" element

Matt_King: But we would only do that if we were writing the combobox code to be reusable

Adam_Page_: Right--if, for instance, we wanted our own example to take advantage of such an event

Matt_King_: That was my gut instinct on how to respond

Minutes manually created (not a transcript), formatted by scribe.perl version 229 (Thu Jul 25 08:38:54 2024 UTC).

Diagnostics

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Maybe present: Matt_King_

All speakers: Adam_Page_, arigilmore, dmontalvo, Matt_King, Matt_King_, OliverH5

Active on IRC: Adam_Page_, arigilmore, dmontalvo, howard-e, jugglinmike