W3C

– DRAFT –
ARIA and Assistive Technologies Community Group

29 July 2026

Attendees

Present
Joe_Humbert, lola, mmoss
Regrets
-
Chair
-
Scribe
cyns

Meeting minutes

<ChrisCuellar> Test

1. Review agenda and next meeting dates

Lola: I have a topic to add

Matt will be item 6

Introductions

2 Current interop reporting status

Matt: moved rating radio moved to draft review

Matt: closed issues 1365 and 1246. Did a lot of research. We should treat this the same as radio button with active descendant. NVDA read all radio buttons when interacting. Roving tab index fixes

Matt: that inconsisstent behavior is consistently reproducable with NVDA. Reported excess verbocity to NVAccess

Matt: No other changes

Matt: have 2 other test plans that could soon advance. Minimal data grid we'll look at today. Another blocked by app, which is next on agenda

3. App outage tomorrow

Matt: servers down 9am pacific tomorrow, for ~1hr

4. App engineering opportunity

Matt: need help marketing an issue - 1666 tabs test plan has unexpected conflicts error, can't advance. Need help figuring out what is going on

Matt: Chris or Elizabeth, can you look at this? We can give you some mentoring assistance

Chris: I should have some time this coming month. Happy to mentor anyone who wants to help. will help you understand the system!

<liz> Yes I am

Matt: need to check with daniel at w3c - some of our repositories have moved to github.com/w3c-cg/aria-at (from w3c/aria-at) which has changed permissions. This issue is still in the old one. Most of us aren't in new one, can't be assigned

(debugging discussion)

5. Issue 1394: Resolve conflicting JAWS results in Minimal Data Grid test plan

w3c-cg/aria-at#1394

Github: w3c-cg/aria-at#1394

Matt: Murray and Joe were testing, had conflicting results. Joe's doesn't include new column header and name, Murray's does, when you nav letf in the grid

Matt: Might be related to applications mode vs. forms mode

Matt: ran setup on page, put jaws in forms/app mode, and got murray's result

Matt: did set up after ins-z did the other

Joe: difference seems to be automatic forms mode vs. manually toggling PC cursor

Murray: did confim I was in PC cursor mode

Matt: did close read of test instructions. I interpret them to be how Murray did it. do alt-del after setup button

Matt: Joe did you interpret it differently?

Joe: Not in forms mode until you active setup button. Need to do alt-del after. Told me Forms PC cursor not PC cursor.

Matt: we specify which cursor is active. I think Vispero would always consider inconsistencies between forms and apps mode a bug

Murray: should be consistent no matter how you switch mode

Matt: both are wrong in JAWS 2026

Joe: In other tests, if you switch mode, it typically does PC cursor and Virtual Cursor mode. Now it's dropping "forms." is that a different mdoe?

Joe: should I make a screen recording?

Matt: alt-del and ins-z give different answers

Matt: to resolve issue, Joe to change to Murray's results

Matt: even though this passes with JAWS 2025, it's going to fail with JAWS 2026

Matt: will report separately that you can get different results

(debugging discussion)

Matt: there might be an app bug related to saving those results. Conflict has vanished. Had a similar problem with rating test#5. might be an issue with submitting edited results

6 issue 1396 Create reusable test modules for APG and HTML-AAM

w3c-cg/aria-at#1396

Lola: I've been funded by STF to work on ACD related to web standards, includign this group!

Lola: HTML-AAM tests are pulling in from APG pattern tests. e.g. there are 500 tests for button. this is cumbersome.

Lola: Matt, I think you talked about having reusable compoent tests (liek button tests)

Lola: but now I'm not sure that will work after all. Web Features accessibiltiy can change based on context

Lola: Now I'm thinking of separate set of HTML-AAM tests. We could use the ARIA-AT app.

Matt: we did work on this last august (Chris did). We have 3 sets of test cases

Matt: that's separate from the mappings

Matt: We have have a directory of APG, one for HTML test patterns, and one for ARIA test patterns

Matt: they are separated that way so we can identify the more "atomic" test cases, where there isn't context, or attribute is tested in single very specific context

Matt: one example - aria-required on text field is separate from aria-required on radio button or other form components

Matt: there are tons of patterns in APG where aria-selected is tested. but we could have an atomic test for aria-selected on a list box

Matt: for ACD, you will need to be careful, because you can get different behaviors for different commands (liek we saw in earlier issue today)

Matt: Not sure you want to throw away context-dependent results in ACD?

Lolo: that depends. We want to surface 2 kinds of data. "Raw data" and also updates to docs (e.g. MDN) based on data

Lola: For nuanced ones, MDN already has an accessibility considerateions section that we can add to

Lola: I don't see the HTML tests in the repo

Lola: looking at the code, each APG test has a csv that has refernces to (for example) the button in html-aam

Lola: using that to populate the data for the web feature. Chris is that right

Chris: yes, I think so

Matt: It's simpler. The csv gets turned into JSON. Every assertion can map to one or more specs. If an APG pattern uses a native html button, and the assertion is related to the button role (e.g. named from content), we map those assertions to HTML-AAM, so we can determine if any give AT treats a native button differently

Lola: That makes sense for ARIA-AT, but not necessarily for ACD

Lola: Can we make an HTML-AAM directory that tests individual elements

Matt: we set up the ability, but there aren't any tests. We can make a directory named HTML and it should work

Matt: we did test this. Maybe it was on staging?

(debugging discussion)

Lola: confirming that I'm ok to start writing tests for html-aam?

Matt: yes, we can write tests for html elements and attributes, should go in an html directory in ARIA-AT

Matt: hopefully this will work

Matt: whether we can separate it with our api is a different quesgtion

Lola: haven't looked at it, but probably not

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

Diagnostics

Maybe present: Chris, Joe, Lolo, Matt, Murray

All speakers: Chris, Joe, Lola, Lolo, Matt, Murray

Active on IRC: ChrisCuellar, cyns, Joe_Humbert, liz, lola, Matt_King, mmoss