Should the ARIA spec suggest setting a description on dialogs?

[joanmarie]

It would be nice to have a more consistent, interoperable presentation of dialogs and alertdialogs (both native and ARIA). One possibility would be to encourage authors to put the contents to be presented in a description via aria-description or aria-describedby, and then encourage ATs to prefer that content over whatever they currently do when presenting a newly opened dialog/alertdialog.

There is already some precedent in using this technique:

• Firefox exposes JavaScript alert contents via the accessible description.
• NVDA and Orca present the accessible description, when present, of dialogs as the message content

Also Chromium may start doing something similar (we're discussing it). If it does, and WebKit also does it, then we just need buy-in from the other screen readers.

[joanmarie]

@cookiecrook: Any thoughts on this, both in terms of WebKit and in terms of VoiceOver? Thanks!

[scottaohara]

related: https://github.com/w3c/aria/issues/1195

[aleventhal]

@joanmarie for alert, do you mean alertdialog? Because I think it's easy to determine what to announce for a basic alert -- just the inner text as if from a name from contents computation.

[joanmarie]

@joanmarie for alert, do you mean alertdialog? Because I think it's easy to determine what to announce for a basic alert -- just the inner text as if from a name from contents computation.

Yeah. I have JavaScript alert on my mind at the moment and wasn't thinking in terms of ARIA roles. I've edited the opening comment. Sorry for any confusion!

[jnurthen]

Discussed at https://www.w3.org/2022/05/26-aria-minutes#t05