aria roles and marking up important content

Wed Jun 17 01:16:34 UTC 2009

This seems promising, but I'm wondering whether we are getting to the
point where we have stepped over the threshold of burden we should
reasonably expect to put on static markup? Clearly we would want to
take the static world absolutely as far as we could, but it seems to
me that once we get to this point of issuing device-specific switches
in a newly coined markup namespace, we would want to start thinking
about notations to express this one level back, in the
"component tree" world?
If there is a physical tag that we would wish to suppress completely
on a particular device, it would seem better to set about making
rules to suppress them during rendering. This of course creates
issues of user agent detection and persistence, etc... it is always
a bit disconcerting for me to paste URLs to people from Google Maps
and find they contain junk like "&agent=opera" etc.... but this is
at least evidence that this approach is workable for someone :P

Cheers,
Antranig.

Quoting Clayton H Lewis <Clayton.Lewis at Colorado.EDU>:

> there's an approach that's been hiding in plain sight (from me, anyway)
>
> among the ARIA roles are "main" and "complementary"
> they are intended to do what we want, marking the more and less
> central content in a page
>
> only one thing in a doc is supposed to be tagged "main", so that's
> not very flexible
> but lots of things can be tagged "complementary"
>
> since roles are attributes that CSS can select on, it is easy to
> style out anything tagged "complementary"
>
> this very simple example page shows this:
>
> <html>
> <head>
> 	<title>Role Styling Test</title>
> 	<style type="text/css">
>    		div[role="complementary"] {display:none}
>    	</style>
>
> </head>
> <body>
> <div role="complementary">
> This is secondary text.
> </div>
> <div>
> This is important text.
> </div>
> <div role="complementary">
> This is secondary text.
> </div>
> <div>
> This is secondary text not marked "complementary".
> </div>
> </body>
> </html>
>
> A drawback to using "complementary" in this way would be that if we
> were dealing with content someone else had tagged for ARIA, say with
> a screen reader in mind, they'd be using "complementary" differently,
> that is, NOT to mean "don't show this on an iPhone". so we'd have to
> mess with their tags. We can use RDFa to coin our own role tags that
> no-one else would use, as in this example page:
>
> <html>
> <head>
> 	<title>Role Styling Test</title>
> 	<style type="text/css">
> 		div[property="fe:complementary"] {display:none}
>    	</style>
>
> </head>
> <body>
> <div role="complementary">
> This is secondary text marked with the ARIA "complementary" tag. It's
> visible in this version.
> </div>
> <div>
> This is important text.
> </div>
> <div>
> There follows some text marked with our very own "fe:complementary"
> property. It should be invisible.
> <div property="fe:complementary">
> This is secondary text marked "fe:complementary".
> </div>
> </body>
> </html>
>
>
>
> Clayton Lewis
> Professor of Computer Science
> Scientist in Residence, Coleman Institute for Cognitive Disabilities
> University of Colorado
> http://www.cs.colorado.edu/~clayton
>
>
>
>

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