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Accessible Rich Internet Applications (WAI-ARIA)
https://w3c.github.io/aria/
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aria-post to append additional, contextual information after semantics #2257

Open frankelavsky opened 2 weeks ago

frankelavsky commented 2 weeks ago

Description of bug or feature request

(May or may not intersect with #991.)

I work in accessible data representations and sometimes I'd like to post-pend descriptions after the label and semantics are read out for an element. Currently, most screen readers roughly follow the pattern: "[Label], [semantics], [SR specific stuff]"

I'd like to be able to use aria to do the following between semantics and screen-reader specific announcements: "[Label], [semantics], [post-label, post-semantics stuff], [SR specific stuff]"

Perhaps a new aria attribute such as aria-post, aria-contextual, or aria-additional could help with this. (Oh, and please let me know if something like this already exists! I'm obviously not aware, if so.)

To me, the use cases largely involve instructions for using a custom interactive element, contextual information (such as how elements might relate to others or data-related context), or for notes/non-essential/potentially redundant label information.

In data visualization/navigable data experiences it is common to have a lot of label bloat at the element level, for example marks in a scatterplot might all have data-related descriptions (aka the label), standard semantics (img or button or link or something), but then also potentially have special information that might be nice to move after the semantics. Examples would be "part of the North America Group," "has 6 siblings," or "press F1 for keyboard controls," etc. These can sometimes feel redundant when many elements are the same and can be painful to wait for, especially when elements have similar keyboard controls but the semantics might be different within a chart (such as img versus link). For now, I've just been adding all of this info into the label. But sometimes I think having semantics first would be helpful!

As some context, there is some research by the folks at MIT (by @jonathanzong and @shulijones) on customization of text at a low level, so there is some precedence here for the bigger picture idea that text label and ordering could even be adjustable beyond this proposal's scope.

Looking forward to discussion on this!

Will this require a change to CORE-AAM?

Unsure.

Will this require a change to the ARIA authoring guide?

Possibly.

jnurthen commented 2 weeks ago

@cookiecrook please look for any status related issues