W3C

– DRAFT –
ARIA Authoring Practices Task Force

12 August 2025

Attendees

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

Meeting minutes

<Jem> https://github.com/w3c/aria-practices/wiki/August-12%2C-2025-Agenda

Setup and Review Agenda

Jem: Next meeting: August 19

Jem: Any requests for change to agenda?

howard-e: I might. I shared an issue about the toolbar

Matt_King: I saw that. We can add it to the agenda if you like

howard-e: Sure. I don't have anything to add beyond the issue I filed, but I can share context

Publication planning

Matt_King: We haven't set a date, yet, but we do have a few things in the milestone which are actually done

<Jem> https://github.com/w3c/aria-practices/milestone/39

Matt_King: I've merged two that are in there. One is the editor menubar fix; the other is the editorial fix for JavaScript casing

Matt_King: Looking at some of the stuff that we have in the works... I wonder if, now that Adam_Page has experience from the disclosure card, if he has a sense about whether we can wrap it up before Labor Day

Adam_Page: I think so. I did some more work this past week. I can share more when we reach this item in today's agenda

Matt_King: Maybe we would shoot for September 3rd as a publication date. That's right after Labor Day. That could be a pretty reasonable target. It would give us some time to land the spin button and maybe reach some other low-hanging fruit

Matt_King: Potentially the changes to skipTo.js, as well--that's also on the agenda

howard-e: September 3rd works for me

Matt_King: Alright, I'll update the milestone then

Adam_Page: I'll be out of town for the Labor Day weekend, but that shouldn't impact my work

Jem: Don't feel too much pressure, Adam_Page. We'll accommodate your schedule!

GitHub spam

Matt_King: We've accrued many frivolous bug reports in the issue tracker

Matt_King: When this has happened in the past, I have manually closed the issues. I've locked the issues and marked them as spam

Matt_King: There are maybe over 20 issues this time around. I didn't have the bandwidth to address it

Matt_King: It looks like the flow of frivolous issues from this account has stopped

Jem: I can report them using GitHub's user interface

Issue 3293: Adding "Read This First" link to the top of each pattern page

github: w3c/aria-practices#3320

Matt_King: Everything looks good, here. We have all the necessary reviews, so thanks to everyone for that

Matt_King: This work is tricky to merge, though, because it requires coordination between two repositories

howard-e: This patch can land before the corresponding pull request to the "build" repository. Still, I would advise not to merge this until that review is complete

Matt_King: When the review is complete there, can you comment on this issue and say that it's safe to merge?

howard-e: Sure

Matt_King: Great. I think this is really good. I think it's a very positive change.

PR 3213: Update SkipTo feature to version 5.8

github: w3c/aria-practices#3213

Matt_King: Ari tested this on an iPhone and left a comment saying that she couldn't get it to work

Matt_King: I think she couldn't get the menu to open

jongund: If you don't have a keyboard, you can't open the menu

Matt_King: But if you're using a screen reader, you will still observe it

jongund: I have an iPhone, so I can test it out

Jem: She's asking how she performs an action equivalent to "tab" on mobile

jongund: Well, we don't have a "click" event on the menu button

jongund: What does VoiceOver do with hidden content? If something is "display: none", is it considered inert?

Matt_King: This isn't "display: none", this is off-screen

Adam_Page: I just did a very quick test on my iPhone, and I was able to navigate backwards to the skipTo menu

Adam_Page: It looks like it's working to me, so I am curious to hear more from Ari

Adam_Page: I was doing this on the production APG site

Matt_King: The question is whether it works on this new version, from the preview

Adam_Page: I can check that

Jem: I'll assign it to you, Adam_Page

Adam_Page: I'll check the deploy preview. If it still seems to be working to me, then I'll double-check with Ari and make sure I understand what she is expecting

Matt_King: Thank you! We have time here because we're planning to deploy on September 3

Jem: the production APG site is currently using version 5.3.2 of skipTo.js

PR 3328: Add Quantity Spin Button

github: w3c/aria-practices#3328

Adam_Page: After we chatted about this last week, I restored the "date picker" example and put a deprecation warning on it (and ensured that the depcration warning appears on the index page)

<Jem> https://deploy-preview-424--aria-practices.netlify.app/aria/apg/patterns/spinbutton/examples/quantity-spinbutton/#example

Adam_Page: I also wrote a whole bunch of tests. I would be very grateful for a review from someone who knows what they are doing because I haven't written many of this kind of Selenium test

Matt_King: Did you write tests on roles and states and properties?

Adam_Page: Yes

jongund: I can review the tests

Adam_Page: Awesome, thank you!

howard-e: I can review, as well

Adam_Page: What about content? Should I do an editorial review?

Adam_Page: Yes, please. I haven't made any changes to copy since last week, but my initial push included a lot of copy

Matt_King: Do you want to take it out of the "draft" state?

Adam_Page: Sure

Jem: How do I get the focus on the minus and plus?

Adam_Page: You don't

Adam_Page: It's because the inputs themselves are focusable. A sighted user would bring focus to the inputs and know that they could either type numbers or use their arrow keys

Adam_Page: The minus and plus buttons are present more for mouse users and especially for touch users

jongund: That's consistent with the previous example

Matt_King: Doesn't the spec say something about not focusing the plus and minus buttons?

Adam_Page: It does! I can't remember if it's phrased as "authors MUST" or "authors SHOULD"

Failing toolbar test

github: w3c/aria-practices#3331

howard-e: Toward the end of last week, I noticed a lot of patches were failing the automated tests

howard-e: I used a toolbar example as a test

howard-e: It seems like, in the test now, for whatever reason, it isn't picking up when items have been checked

howard-e: At first, I couldn't reproduce it locally--only on GitHub Actions

howard-e: But recently (as of this week), I have been able to reproduce it on my own

howard-e: I can't think of anything that would cause this

Matt_King: I didn't notice it failing on any of the pull requests that I just merged...

howard-e: Those were submitted prior to whenever this failure started

Matt_King: So it's a failure that's looking for the "aria-checked" state on a menu item?

howard-e: That's right

Adam_Page: Could it be a WebDriver update?

howard-e: That was my thought. There was an update in this time span, but nothing looked suspicious

howard-e: It looks like a timing issue. I'm especially interested to learn why this started now, in the absence of any change in our project

howard-e: The continuous integration environment has a lot of dependencies. It may be caused by an updated dependency there

Matt_King: We always have the nuclear option of disabling a test. I hate doing that

Jem: Please, no!

Matt_King: if you have time to look into this during this week, howard-e, that would be great--especially with the pull requests we're expecting

howard-e: Sure thing

Jem: The error message says "timeout", right? It doesn't successfully open the menu

howard-e: That's right

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

Diagnostics

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

Active on IRC: Jem, jugglinmike