13265 2011-07-15 00:08:54 +0000 Should disallow <a> elements to be made into buttons, checkboxes, radio buttons, tabs, or tree items, since those are all semantic abuse 2011-10-02 05:12:54 +0000 1 1 1 Unclassified HTML WG LC1 HTML5 spec unspecified Other other RESOLVED FIXED http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/#table-aria-weak a11y P3 normal --- 1 contributor ian eoconnor hsivonen ian jonas laura.lee.carlson mike public-html-a11y public-html-admin public-html-wg-issue-tracking public-html-bugzilla oldest_to_newest 51090 0 contributor 2011-07-15 00:08:54 +0000 Specification: http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/complete.html Multipage: http://www.whatwg.org/C#table-aria-weak Complete: http://www.whatwg.org/c#table-aria-weak Comment: Should disallow <a> elements to be made into buttons, checkboxes, radio buttons, tabs, or tree items, since those are all semantic abuse Posted from: 216.239.45.4 by ian@hixie.ch User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_5_8) AppleWebKit/535.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/14.0.803.0 Safari/535.1 51204 1 hsivonen 2011-07-18 12:46:53 +0000 EDITOR'S RESPONSE: This is an Editor's Response to your comment. If you are satisfied with this response, please change the state of this bug to CLOSED. If you have additional information and would like the editor to reconsider, please reopen this bug. If you would like to escalate the issue to the full HTML Working Group, please add the TrackerRequest keyword to this bug, and suggest title and text for the tracker issue; or you may create a tracker issue yourself, if you are able to do so. For more details, see this document: http://dev.w3.org/html5/decision-policy/decision-policy.html Status: Rejected Change Description: no spec change Rationale: It is assumed that semantic abuse exists regardless of ARIA and the whole point of ARIA is to make semantic abuse accessible as an afterthought. If semantic abuse revealed by ARIA were considered an error, it's likely that enough authors would remove ARIA than to remove the semantic abuse that it would be a problem. 52421 2 mike 2011-08-04 05:01:18 +0000 mass-moved component to LC1 57621 3 ian 2011-10-02 05:12:27 +0000 That isn't the point of ARIA. ARIA is primarily for developers creating custom widgets and other web application components. It allows authors to provide accessibility hooks for ATs in cases where the user agent would otherwise have nothing useful to provide. It is not intended for use by authors who are trying to convey the very semantics that HTML can already convey. In any case, having an AT label a link as being a button actually hurts accessibility, it doesn't improve it, as it makes it impossible for the user to understand instructions. For example, if they visit a page that has a link labeled as role=button, and they read instructions telling them to click on the link, they would not be able to find it, as they would be looking for a link and not a button. Similarly, labeling an interactive control such as a link as being a tree item would harm accessibility, as it would hide from the user the fact that the link could be activated and followed. Ergo, I am reopening this bug. EDITOR'S RESPONSE: This is an Editor's Response to your comment. If you are satisfied with this response, please change the state of this bug to CLOSED. If you have additional information and would like the editor to reconsider, please reopen this bug. If you would like to escalate the issue to the full HTML Working Group, please add the TrackerRequest keyword to this bug, and suggest title and text for the tracker issue; or you may create a tracker issue yourself, if you are able to do so. For more details, see this document: http://dev.w3.org/html5/decision-policy/decision-policy.html Status: Partially Accepted Change Description: see diff given below Rationale: However, the initial request is not entirely correct either. It does, to some extent, make sense for links to be used as tabs. So I've left that as conforming. 57622 4 contributor 2011-10-02 05:12:54 +0000 Checked in as WHATWG revision r6610. Check-in comment: Disallow some combinations that would indicate element misuse. http://html5.org/tools/web-apps-tracker?from=6609&to=6610