W3C

– DRAFT –
ARIA Authoring Practices Task Force

08 July 2025

Attendees

Present
Adam_Page, Daniel, howard-e, Jem, jongund, jugglinmike, lola, Matt_King
Regrets
-
Chair
-
Scribe
jugglinmike

Meeting minutes

Setup and Review Agenda

https://github.com/w3c/aria-practices/wiki/July-8%2C-2025-Agenda

Matt_King: No meeting July 15

Matt_King: Next meeting: July 22

Matt_King: Any requests for change to agenda?

Matt_King: I explicitly left out the SkipTo.js issue, with apologies to Jongunderson

Matt_King: Hearing no suggestions for changes to the agenda, we'll stick with the agenda as planned

Publication planning

Matt_King: We're planning on publishing tomorrow or Thursday

Daniel: No preference between those two days, though we may not get to it until Thursday

howard-e: I will tag you

Matt_King: There are five things that are done, landed and in the "closed" tab.

Matt_King: There are two things that are open: one is on the agenda, and the other (the one on color contrast) will not be ready in time

<jugglinmike> s/jongunderson/jongund/

Matt_King: I'll send howard-e the "green light" via e-mail when we've landed everything we are going to land--hopefully this afternoon.

Matt_King: And after that, hopefully Jem can help with the QA

Jem: Sure!

howard-e: Sounds good!

PR 3251 - New example demonstrating expandable cards/regions

github: w3c/aria-practices#3251

Matt_King: Both Adam_Page and I were pushing changes today. I think those were minor and that we have sufficient approving reviews

Matt_King: There was one piece of "spin off" feedback regarding the character casing in JavaScript

Adam_Page: I don't think there is any other feedback that we haven't addressed.

Adam_Page: There might be some open questions remaining from earlier reviews... Nope, it looks like everything is resolved

Daniel: Do we want to add two phrases for the example to help explain the last paragraph?

Matt_King: We could make the last paragraph more specific

Daniel: There's another audience that visit APG to know how things work. And we have pages that are more explanatory for them

Matt_King: What do you have in mind? Maybe, "Instead, by modifying the structure to be a card that contains a button rather than a heading where all of its content is a button"

Adam_Page: We're distinguishing it from a vanilla disclosure

Matt_King: Ah, but the vanilla disclosure doesn't have a heading

Matt_King: "We modify the disclosure so that instead of the entire disclosure being a button containing plain test, we make it a card with the 'article' role"

Matt_King: There's a lot of stuff inside of the card besides just the button

Adam_Page: Right. And that interesting stuff--there's a lot of it in both the "summary" as well as the expanded form

Matt_King: I'm happy to help doing a little wordsmithing, if you like

Adam_Page: I can take a whack at it, but I feel like you have a better handle on the essence of what we need to communicate here. If you can offer a suggest, then I can wordsmith it

Matt_King: Yeah, I can do that.

Jem: When you search with the "filter", when does this example show up?

Matt_King: It's under "disclosure"

Matt_King: We didn't include the words "region" or "expandable" in the final draft because we're not using the "region" role and because the card is more generic

Matt_King: We don't have a "card" pattern of any kind

Matt_King: If were to ever add a "card collection" pattern, we would probably used his code as an example of that

Matt_King: This almost demonstrates a "card collection" pattern. Adam_Page included three cards--that's a collection!

Matt_King: We have an open issue for search--we never implemented search

PR 3306: Rename Javascript to JavaScript

github: w3c/aria-practices#3306

Matt_King: This was spun up as a result of a comment in a previous pull request

Matt_King: A contributor made a fix for this almost immediately! I included a link in the agenda

howard-e: I checked out the error in CI, and I replied to it on the pull request

howard-e: The template doesn't have the updated case, but they modified the affected file directly

howard-e: I was giving the contributor a chance to update

Matt_King: Got it

Matt_King: I would like to have someone assigned as a reviewer so that when the change lands, someone can step in and finalize

Jem: I volunteer. I assigned to myself

Matt_King: Thank you!

Issue 3261: Spinbuttons, Target Size, and equivalent exception

github: w3c/aria-practices#3261

Matt_King: We're continuing a discussion that we started last week

Matt_King: There's one question about the presence of buttons

Matt_King: There's also a broader question: why do we have a spin button without an "edit" box? Is that a pattern that we really want others to use? Or would we rather promote the use of a slider for those situations

Matt_King: Do we want to keep this example as-is? that is, a spinner without a text input?

Matt_King: Last week, Adam_Page mentioned how date pickers in iOS were similar, but not identical

Adam_Page: Right, not identical, but very similar. Three spinners next to one another

Adam_Page: The main difference is that those spinners are infinite

Matt_King: So it looks like one of those old fashion digital clocks where you could see the mechanism that rolled on the inside

Adam_Page: Yes, I suspect those were an inspiration for the visual design

Adam_Page: I find this design super-cumbersome

Matt_King: That was the complaint in ARIA-AT. Folks were asking, "why are we going to do interoperability testing on this thing that we would never want people to use?"

Matt_King: I wonder if we could make something work like this in a web context

Adam_Page: I've seen them on the web, but I wonder about the trade-offs. The infinite nature is not trivial

Matt_King: Thinking about the keyboard user's experience, that sounds a little bit like an anti-pattern. Why do heavy engineering for a poor usability experience?

jongund: I've never seen anything like this. I think we were looking for something that was a spinbutton

Matt_King: There are real spinbuttons out there that have an "edit" field. Those exist in the real world

<Adam_Page> Apple calls this pattern a “Picker”: https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guidelines/pickers

Matt_King: A common date-picker that I've seen in web apps that I use (and certainly internally at work), it does have an "edit" field, and tha field takes the values as you press "up arrow"

jongund: What if it was just a number range, for zero to one hundred?

jongund: With dates, you have to worry about format

Matt_King: The ones I'm thinking of only use numbers

<Adam_Page> Here’s one web implementation from Mobiscroll: https://demo.mobiscroll.com/fullscreen/datetime/mobile-desktop-usage

Matt_King: I have no idea what these things look like, though--whether there is a button for incrementing and decrement, for example. I assume such buttons exist because you can increment and decrement with the arrow keys

Adam_Page: In the link I shared, they replicate the Apple UI.

Adam_Page: And for what it's worth, Apple refers to this pattern as a "picker"

Adam_Page: It is infinite and it is keyboard-operable. I can see it uses some accessible markup, but I don't know how accessible it truly is

Matt_King: HTML "range" is what gives you the native spin behavior, right?

Matt_King: How would an ARIA input type "number" be different than a native HTML one?

Adam_Page: I think the way browsers have implemented the native HTML one, the "up" and "down" buttons are not focusable and may have even been suppressed from the accessibility tree

Matt_King: That would be a good thing!

Matt_King: I've observed date pickers which are three spin buttons that share the same "edit" box

<Adam_Page> Adobe’s NumberField in ReactAria is a good example of a custom spinner: https://react-spectrum.adobe.com/react-aria/NumberField.html

Matt_King: I actually really like this because it's just one "input" field but it has cool interaction capabilities

Matt_King: I have no idea about what the visual design looks like

Daniel: In the W3C calendar these days, we have a similar thing that Matt_King describes. Unfortunately, it's three tab stops (for day, month, and year), but if you press the arrow key, you travel between them. To try it, you just have to edit or create an event on the W3C Calendar

Matt_King: I think we have two good options for inspiration: the Adobe one that Adam_Page shared and the W3C one that Daniel has just referenced

Matt_King: I am hearing that the example we currently have is more of an example of what you could do, but it's less of an example of something that you would want to do

Matt_King: Do we have consensus on that? Is it something we want to change?

jongund: the APG is ranked highly in my search engine's response to the query "spin button"

Matt_King: We might be able to keep this as a date picker spin button, but just redo it so it has an "edit" field

Matt_King: That seems like the least disruptive and maybe the most useful

Adam_Page: I'll take it, though I'm very busy right now, so it may take me some time

Jem: That's fine!

Jem: Should we close this issue and open a new one?

Matt_King: I think we can keep this issue and assign it to Adam_Page. We'll have today's meeting minutes posted to the issue's discussion thread. If necessary, we can change the title of the issue

Matt_King: jongund if you have an opportunity to review pull request 3309 (since I know you know this issue really well), that would be helpful. I'm not sure I understand what the contributor is doing--they submitted the patch without a corresponding issue.

jongund: Sure, you can assign it to me

Minutes manually created (not a transcript), formatted by scribe.perl version 244 (Thu Feb 27 01:23:09 2025 UTC).

Diagnostics

Failed: s/jongunderson/jongund/

Succeeded: s/Jem:/Matt_King:/

Succeeded: s/identica/identical/

Succeeded: s/you travel between them/you travel between them. To try it, you just have to edit or create an event on the W3C Calendar/

All speakers: Adam_Page, Daniel, howard-e, Jem, jongund, Matt_King

Active on IRC: Adam_Page, Daniel, jugglinmike