W3C

– DRAFT –
ARIA Authoring Practices Task Force

25 November 2025

Attendees

Present
CurtBellew
Regrets
-
Chair
-
Scribe
Daniel

Meeting minutes

Publication schedule

Matt: I moved our milestone for 17 Dec
… There are four PRs currently
… One is done
… The next we'll be talking about just now
… Then there's a big one we've been pushing off for some time in color contrast guidance
… Still aspirational for us to get this ready by the 17th
… There is another really important change, related to the support tables from aria-at. We changed the repo structure and that broke the sindication. I'll be adding a PR for that

Daniel: Remi may not be able on the 17. We may need to just pull this forward with only the things that are done and leave the rest for later

Matt: I'd like to get the aria-at tables fixed

Daniel: I'll send you an email with our availability

Issue 3193: listbox example with aria-actions

<Matt_King> github: w3c/aria-practices#3372

Matt: In the last minute we summarized the most important changes. That was the week before TPAC
… Do you have any questions?

CurtBellew: I did commit afterwards. Let me check

Matt: Last commit I see is from 20 Oct, that's what I am seeing on the PR

CurtBellew: I pushed something 6 Nov

Matt: I am noticing changes in behavior

CurtBellew: I did add an aria-live, and added the word "favorite" as part of the label

Matt: Awesome changes

Matt: We may want to say "deleted" for consistency with label

CurtBellew: Yes

Matt: We should determine if this is ready, from a code perspective I think it is.

Matt: When you tab into this list, do the actions appear as you focus each item?

CurtBellew: Yes

Matt: Does hover track your movement?

CurtBellew: As you move up and down you see those appear in their current state

Matt: If you are on the bottom one, does move down go away?

CurtBellew: If you move something up, for example the second to the first, that gets reflected
… Weird scenario is when I use my keyboard and then use the mouse, I could get two sets of actions at the same time

Matt: I am not sure if we can do something about it

CurtBellew: Focus and hover at the same time may be a way for us to get around this

Matt: If you move the hover down to the one that is currently focus, does that go away?

CurtBellew: Yes.
… Buttons are huge on the deploy version, they're much smaller on my local copy. We may need to do something to adjust it

Matt: There must be something in the stylesheets that we use

Matt: We should get this addressed before others do visual review

Matt: Each of us have a couple of actions, then we may move this to "ready for review"

Matt: Vispero was asking about this
… Bryan, have you experiment what we are doing?

Bryan: not yet

Daniel: Is that already in the 2026 release?

Matt: Yes.

Matt: JAWS keystroke is Insert Windows a

Matt: Focus got lost when I pressed the key

Matt: We should probably work around some of the problems we are seeing here. Sounds like the browsers need to be doing something
… It seems JAWS is clicking the "favorite" button

CurtBellew: It's not changing focus, just setting the activedescendant

Matt: When you move focus from the listbox item with the arrow keys, is activelement moving or ativedescendant pointing to the button?

CurtBellew: Activedescendant

Matt: So if you click the favorite button, aren't you changing activedescendant?

CurtBellew: That's not

Matt: I think that's what we want. You want activedescendant to stay the same when you click
… Clicking a button probably should not change activedescendant

Matt: For some reason JAWS is not recognizing that focus is still in the list box
… That might be a JAWS issue. The Chrome bug is still the naming though
… It's not an aria-actions requirement to use activedescendant

Matt: If you didn't use activedescendant and you click the button, that would be a problem

CurtBellew: Yes, normal thing would be to put focus there and then click

Matt: Why not the roving focus?

CurtBellew: It shouldn't make a difference, just though this approach would be easier

Matt: The actions are inside of the options, they are descendant

CurtBellew: This has clickable inside clickae, which I think is what aria-actions wanted to represent

Daniel: Interested in how keyboard support would play with other screen readers

Matt: Keyboard support should work

Matt: Seems like we are close to landing this

CurtBellew: Thanks, happy to work on this

Matt: Curt you'll work on the CSS and I am going to make sure documentation is ready for thorough review

Minutes manually created (not a transcript), formatted by scribe.perl version 248 (Mon Oct 27 20:04:16 2025 UTC).

Diagnostics

Succeeded: s/appear/appear in their current state/

Succeeded 1 times: s/roabing/roving/g

Maybe present: Bryan, Daniel, Matt

All speakers: Bryan, CurtBellew, Daniel, Matt

Active on IRC: CurtBellew, Daniel, Matt_King