W3C

– DRAFT –
ARIA WG

02 October 2025

Attendees

Present
Adam_Page, Daniel, filippo-zorzi, front-endian-jane, Jacques, jcraig, katez, Matt_King, pkra, Rahim, sarah, siri, smockle, Stefan
Regrets
-
Chair
-
Scribe
spectranaut_

Meeting minutes

New PR Triage

w3c/aria#2643

Sarah: this topic is on the agenda

New Issue Triage

w3c/aria#2642

Peter: that is from the editor's meeting

w3c/aria#2639

jamesn: from the feedback from ARIA IDL work

Rahim: pretty sure the answer is no

Rahim: but maybe aria-disabled/hidden/expanded should work like html boolean attributes like "disabled"

Rahim: but maybe we should talk about it

jamesn: I'll agenda it

w3c/aria#2638

front-endian-jane: I can put a PR with what I think should be the change and we can talk about it then

WPT Open PRs

web-platform-tests/wpt#54126 - waiting for feedback

jcraig: More opinions from other browser engineers on https://github.com/web-platform-tests/wpt/pull/53733?

jcraig: web-platform-tests/wpt#53676 these work from safari and chrome, but keith can you look at it for gecko

keithamus: There needs to be some changes, we should have a webdriver way to say "wait for this promise to resolve" before considering the crash test a crash

jcraig: sounds non blocking, we should look into that

jcraig: there are some old ones from giacomo and scott, please review or re-review

rahim: I wanted to ask if we should document the behavior of tests that don't apply for a particular browser.... because someone would see that and see firefox doesn't crash, even though the test didn't really run

jcraig: add a readme to the directory?

keithamus: if we had an issue describing this we could point to the issue

keithamus: I'll file an issue

jcraig: put the issue in the accessibility interop repo

agenda, next item

TPAC planning

jamesn: will someone from apple lead this?

jcraig: its tenative, but yes if so

jcraig: I think we need someone from the openusd, but not sure they will make it

jcraig: openusd is a model file format where we are hoping to get accessibility properties in there, the first set to ship is label description and priority

jcraig: there are parallels to SVG

jcraig: in that SVG can have an alt associated with it, remotely linked, embedded accessibility information in the file.

jamesn: even if it is a brief overview of what is going on, it would be useful to have

jcraig: if nothing else I can give the overview

jamesn: maybe appropriate for a slightly wider APA group discussion?

jamesn: maybe broader than ARIA?

jamesn: unless we just want to get in a nitty gritty technical detail, this would be the group, but if you wanted broad strokes/brainstorming it could be helpful

jcraig: maybe not joint -- but you and that APA chairs could not schedule competing times, so they could attend if they were interested?

The above discussion was about: w3c/aria#2644

w3c/aria#2644

jcraig: do we want one session on accessibility interop? maybe we need individual sessions on separate topics under this

jcraig: like the accessibility property bag that jamie teh and rahim and working on, and the AAM tests val is working on

jcraig: I was hoping to have time to discuss which of this bullet list we wanted to separate out into separate meetings

matt_king: there is a lot to cover just on the AT topic

jcraig: maybe we do keep this one just about AT interop as you filed it

jcraig: lola said there is a breakout group on tuesday

matt_king: I filled two, one for daniel, about a high level discussion of pulling all the pieces together. It might be good to have some of these other topics covered for the group before the higher level discussion

Daniel: it doesn't have to be one or the other, we could have both

Daniel: I haven't had time to put my thoughts in the issue, I thought of this as a joint meeting, to know what everyone is doing in terms of accessibility testing

jcraig: I'll file another issue as a discussion of property bag of web driver

matt_king: I think I want a full hour on AT testing

jamesn: what is your goal for the output of this?

matt_king: We are moving away from incubation and towards formalizing the ARIA-AT work. But "which work"

jcraig: lets leave this one, call it accessibility interop -- cover all the pieces then deep dive into ARIA-AT.

jcraig: with pointers to all the others

spectranaut_: I'll make an update on Acacia/AAM tests

matt_king: We should organize the sessions in a way that helps people go from one rendering stack to the other end of the rendering stack, and all the work we are doing to harmonize all this work together. The bigger problem is that we aren't harmonized and we don't have a comprehensive strategy

jamesn: Matt, can you put your thoughts into one of these items

[aria-valuenow]: default to native value when one exists

sarah: quick over view, role=input on a input type text

sarah: the input has a native value, but you are required to put aria-valuenow, it seems unnecessary, it can cause problems, this can conflict in terms of timing -- the value is updated, but aria-valuenow is update a cycle later

sarah: I wanted to make it clear the default value of aria-valuenow should be the native value where it exists

sarah: better fall back for aria-valuenow than zero when native value exists

jcraig: great, I agree conceptually with the change. I'll review. A handful of things...

sarah: it is draft because it's not complete yet, more sections need to be added, but you can review what is there

jcraig: we should reference the host language generally and use html as the example

Matt_King: I haven't looked at the PR, but I'm so happy you are doing this!

Matt_King: does this involve changes to aria-valuenow description

sarah: no, the value calculation for roles that use it would change

jcraig: it is in the description prose of spinbutton..... but should it be moved to the aria-valuenow discussion?

Matt_King: there are a bunch of other circumstances, where not requiring aria-valuenow is a problem. like sliders, where aria-valuetext is specified, aria-valuenow should be added

Matt_King: and it makes it much more verbose when both aria-valuetext and aria-valuenoe are included

sarah: yeah, there is an issue open for value calculation, value calculation wouldn't solve this particular issue

sarah: matt I fully agree, but I don't want to expand the scope of this

sarah: I'm actually make this pretty scoped, the number of elements that have native values that you can do this for is quite small, see aria-html

Jacques: my question is: for spinbutton, that makes sense... but what else?

sarah: the things that can have aria-value now are limited, so that is the gaurdrails

sarah: but if you put a progressbar on an input, I don't see a problem with the value gettinga default

sarah: (reads the open question)

sarah: One open question: if the native value is set to something that cannot be evaluated as a number such as "5 cm", should we say that authors MUST define aria-valuenow, or should we say that the value should be treated as aria-valuetext?

jamesn: because of the ability for this to happen, what would be the harm, if we always did aria-valuetext instead of aria-valuenow

sarah: I'm curious to hear what jcraig has to say, voiceover doesn't read valuetext at all

jcraig: I think that is clearly a bug

sarah: generally it reads the percent, not the aria-valuenow number

jcraig: every control is different, for a spin button, I think it reads the value.... but maybe there is a combo of native control and aria and it doesn't do the expected thing... if you have that monstrosity handy please link me....

Jacques: I was going to say, for UIA, and patterns that support range, the API takes in a number. IF the number is not available... I'm not sure if there is a range value that doesn't have a value and supplies text instead that would be difficult for narrater

Matt_King: so james, we have 3 slider examples with robust testing in the ARIA-AT reports. So sarah, did you explain what happens today if someone puts "5cm" in aria-valuenow

sarah: I made this issue and PR two weeks ago and I would have to re-tests

Matt_King: I wonder if the way browsers are doing that right now today, what do they expose. I think we would want that to work the same way, it seems like a good idea, if there is a text string in the native value and it does what you propose, it is exposed as value text, if someone did the samething with valuenow, it would be exposed as valuetext

sarah: that one I might hand off to Jacques... that seems more like, from the browser implementation perspective, that is a reasonablish thing to do

Jacques: I think we parse it as a number, if we can't parse it as a number, we throw it away

Jacques: we expose the value attribute as well as the range attribute. Tools like narrator are looking at the number

<Zakim> jcraig, you wanted to say not seeing a spinbutton test in ARIA-AT, Did Matt mean Slider?

jcraig: I'll gen more test cases for spinbutton

sarah: I heard general suppport....? yes fall back to value text?

(general agreements)

Matt_King: (didn't catch but he had a concern)

sarah: I think I'm solving a different, specific use case

<jamesn> +1 to sarah

<Zakim> jcraig, you wanted to discuss cloaking...

jcraig: this reminds me of a few years ago someone brought up that you can use one of these aria properties to lie to the user agent, and actually they were using javascript, this is one of the properties where you can mask or cloak what is visuallly rendered vs what is exposed to the AT

jamesn: isn't this all of ARIA

jcraig: the reason i thought of this as the scenario that sarah mentioned.. .do you want to suppress the value based on valuetext... the idea that we should prioritize value text in some sort of scenario

jamesn: I've seen things like slider where percentage value make not sense

<Jacques> need to drop a little early, thanks all!

jamesn: there are valid use cases where we really need to overwrite the value with valuetext

Minutes manually created (not a transcript), formatted by scribe.perl version 246 (Wed Oct 1 15:02:24 2025 UTC).

Diagnostics

Succeeded: s/maybe disabled/maybe aria-disabled/

Succeeded: s/opininions/opinions/

Succeeded: s/SCG/SVG/

Succeeded: s/is a file/is a model file/

Succeeded: s/spectranaut_ you're not muted and I think your typing is coming through.//

Succeeded: s/spectranaut_ thank you!//

Succeeded: s/if you/but if you/

Succeeded: s/like slide/like slider/

Maybe present: jamesn, keithamus, Peter, spectranaut_

All speakers: Daniel, front-endian-jane, Jacques, jamesn, jcraig, keithamus, matt_king, Peter, Rahim, Sarah, spectranaut_

Active on IRC: Adam_Page, Daniel, filippo-zorzi, front-endian-jane, Jacques, jamesn, jcraig, katez, Matt_King, pkra, Rahim, sarah, siri, smockle, spectranaut_, Stefan