Change Proposal for ISSUE-129

Summary

Change nothing.

Rationale

The bug titles given below are intended to describe the actual underlying requests or issues raised in the bugs. They do not match the original bug summaries as those were often quite misleading when compared to the actual requests.

General points

The current section defining the relationship between the HTML and ARIA specifications uses an approach eminently suited for addressing accessibility in HTML. It is defined in terms that the ARIA specification uses, provides the information needed by implementors, authors, and validator writers, and provides a coherent and concise set of UA and document requirements.

Conformance criteria must be used to lessen the probability that developers will use ARIA to make their content inaccessible. This can be achieved, for instance, by using them to ensure that when ARIA is used, it is used correctly and in such a manner that will improve the accessibility of the content to which it is applied. The current specification text achieves this.

Bug 10444: Requesting a list of all the elements that do not have a default ARIA role

Bug: http://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=10444

• There's no clear use case for this. Implementors wouldn't benefit (no default role would just be the overall default, so there's no need to list out which specific cases it should apply to). Authors wouldn't benefit (the section is listing restrictions, it's self-evident that anything that isn't restricted is unrestricted). Validators wouldn't benefit (there's nothing to implement if it's not a restriction).

• An accurate list would be confusing to authors. For example, for each element one would have to explicitly list that it does have a role if the accesskey is set with a valid value that the user agent was able to apply, etc. For elements that have roles in specific situations, like H1 which only has a role when it's not in an HGROUP, or INPUT elements which only have roles when their TYPE attribute is in particular states, the situation is even worse, because the list would have to give all the conditions not matched by the elements when the do have a role. Thus, the list would be extremely opaque and would not be helpful to authors — indeed on the contrary, it would lead authors to thinking the situation was far more complicated than it really is, potentially leading to them not using the features at all, which could conceivably harm accessibility.

• An accurate list would be incredibly hard to maintain, because of the complexities described in the previous point. No accurate list has been put forward; the only attempts at making such a list so far have been either vague or woefully inaccurate.

• Even a vague list would be hard to maintain. We actually had a vague non-normative list in the spec for a while, but ended up removing it from the spec because of the maintenance nightmare that it spawned (the list kept having to be updated because errors kept being found — and that was just with a non-normative vague list).

• Confusion stemming from the inevitable inaccuracies listed in the previous points will likely lead to implementation mistakes, leading to poor interoperability, which would harm accessibility (since this is an accessibility feature).

In summary: no use cases, maintenance nightmare, might even harm accessibility.

Bug 10462: Requesting that the non-normative summary be explicitly part of the normative table

Bug: http://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=10462

Bug 10448: Allow links to be described as scroll bars, buttons to be described as progress bars, etc

Bug: http://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=10448

Bug 10449: Allow an H1 element to be described as a spinbutton or checkbox, etc

Bug: http://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=10449

Bug 10481: Set the default role of IMG elements to ARIA's "img" value

Bug: http://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=10481

Bug 10493: Requesting additional prose in the HTML spec stating that certain roles defined in the ARIA spec have restrictions on their use defined in the ARIA spec

Bug: http://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=10493

Bug 10592: ?

Bug: http://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=10592

Bug 10594: ???

Bug: http://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=10594

Bug 10603: ?

Bug: http://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=10603

Bug 10903: Requesting more introductory text

Bug: http://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=10903

Bug 8000: Allow authors to use elements in ways that contradict their semantics

Bug: http://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=8000

Details

Change nothing.

Impact

Conformance Class Changes

None.

Objections to the other change proposal

If there is objectionable material in the other change proposal that would be inappropriate to list in the above CP, then list it here so that it can be tracked and presented during the poll.

Objections to the rationale

• The rationale of this CP implies that requiring authors to violate the semantics of elements should be allowed, but this would lead to serious accessibility and data analysis failures, essentially missing the entire point of HTML's design philosophy for the past 20 years, and regressing us substantially to the days of "font" elements, single-pixel GIFs, and layout tables. This would be a disaster for accessibility, a disaster for advocacy, and would lead to such confusion amongst the developer community that we might easily lose a decade of pro-accessibility advocacy progress (historically, developers have reacted quite poorly to dramatic changes in the messaging on such topics).

• This CP claims that the specification provides tools for authors to violate the semantics of an element in the form of JS and CSS, but does not provide tools in the form of ARIA. However, this is false. The specification provides ARIA tools to violate semantics to the same extent as CSS and JS tools; it makes such violations non-conforming regardless of the technology used (CSS, JS, or ARIA). Therefore this is a false dichotomy: if an author finds it acceptable to violate the specification in one place, it stands to reason that violating the specification elsewhere would be considered no worse, and if an author does not violate the semantics using CSS and/or JS, then there's no need to use ARIA for this use either.

• ARIA markup happens to be one of the few ways we can programatically verify semantic consistency, and seriously relaxing, or indeed removing, the restrictions on how ARIA can be applied to HTML would cause us to largely, or completely, miss this opportunity to educate users to improve their site's accessibility. Furthermore, the specification details care that validators need to take in the messaging in this area to encourage authors to write better, more accessible markup, rather than having them just drop the ARIA — so the risks detailed in this CP have already been mitigated by the specification's current text.

• It is important for overall platform consistency that a platform's specifications take a holistic approach, considering all of the features as a whole rather than each one individually. This CP fails to take such an approach, instead treating ARIA markup as a special case to which basic design principles somehow do not apply. For instance, it is implicitly argued in the CP that authors writing HTML without ARIA are able to update their markup, and this is contrasted to the case of an author writing HTML with ARIA where it is explicitly argued that the author cannot update any markup except ARIA markup. However, this is patently absurd: ARIA markup is just as much markup as the rest of HTML, so if one part of the document can be edited, so can the rest. Indeed, in conjunction with the aforementioned advice for validator implementors, it is more likely that authors will correct their non-ARIA markup than the ARIA annotations, since the validator is not expected to even mention ARIA in such situations.

Objections to the proposed text

• The proposed text contains internal contradictions. For example, it suggests that the "abbr" element has no default role, but then specifies that the "abbr" element (when defining a command) has, in certain cases, the "menuitem" role; it also simultaneously allows authors to use aria-* attributes only in manners allowed in the HTML spec, allows authors to use aria-* attributes in any manner allowed in the ARIA specs, and requires authors to not use the aria-* attributes in ways that conflict with certain requirements, leaving the exact conformance situation highly unclear.

• The proposed text either abuses RFC2119 or has bogus conformance statements (it's unclear which). For example, the text explicitly allows "conflicts" to make things "difficult for assistive technology" (presumably mis-use of RFC2119, since "conflicts" are obviously not a defined conformance class); it also in another paragraph allows authors to "need" to do something.

• The proposed text has redundant conformance requirements, for example it restricts how people may use ARIA features multiple times with subtly different phrasing, without explaining why the requirements are repeated or whether the subtle differences are intended or not. Another example is how it simultaneously has a generic rule regarding state attributes matching equivalent HTML attributes, and has explicit rules for specific attributes. Another example is that it requires support for both the entire ARIA specification and then explicitly requires support for a subset of that specification.

• It contradicts the ARIA specification. For example, for "abbr" elements it says any aria-* attribute is allowed, but the ARIA spec restricts which attributes are allowed based on the role.

• It doesn't use the terms defined by ARIA for the purposes required by this section. For example, the term "strong native semantics" is not used. This means the spec breaks the normative definition chain.

• It requires that aria-autocomplete be set in a way that mirrors the autocomplete="" attribute, despite this contradicting ARIA requirements (aria-autocomplete="" is about author-provided autocompletion UI, not UA-provided UI; the UA obviously is responsible for making its UI accessible, not the author!), and despite this being harmful to accessibility even if it didn't contradict ARIA (since it would mean that any UA with unusual autocompletion UI would be inaccessible on pages that followed the rules given in the proposal).

• It allows ARIA attributes that are redundant with HTML native features, despite this having been demonstrated to result in cargo-cult accessibility authoring, which is harmful to accessibility, as discussed in bug 11557 (http://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=11557).