W3C

– DRAFT –
ARIA Authoring Practices Task Force

11 June 2024

Attendees

Present
arigilmore, Bryan_Garaventa, howard-e, Jem, jongund, jugglinmike, Mark_McCarthy, Matt_King
Regrets
-
Chair
Jemma_Ku
Scribe
jugglinmike

Meeting minutes

<Jem> https://github.com/w3c/aria-practices/wiki/June-11%2C-2024-Agenda

<Jem> https://github.com/w3c/aria-practices/wiki/June-11%2C-2024-Agenda

Setup and Review Agenda

Jem: Next meeting: June 18

Jem: July 4th is a holiday in the US

Matt_King: That falls on a Thursday this year

Matt_King: Do we want to meet on Tuesday, July 2?

Jem: I am taking the week of July 1 off for vacation

arigilmore: I will be out the week after that

jugglinmike: Howard and I will also be out the week of July 8

Jem: I'm out on July 9th

Matt_King: okay, we'll plan on meeting on July 2 but cancelling the July 9 meeting

Jem: Any requests for change to agenda?

jongund: I'd like to discuss a new feature for skipTo.js

Publication planning

Matt_King: We're shooting for June 25th as a next publication date

Matt_King: Jon's "quality review" pull request is awaiting review from howard-e

Matt_King: w3c/aria-practices#3024

Matt_King: It looks like there are no reviewers, actually.

Matt_King: I'm going to assign howard-e for code review

Matt_King: the other things for this milestone are either later in the agenda or not ready for review, yet

Change high contrast system color in ratings slider

github: w3c/aria-practices#3025

jongund: I changed the system color link text to "buttontext". It just makes our widgets look more like form controls than links

Matt_King: why are two files changed?

jongund: I also had to change the cspell configuration. cspell checks CSS files for spelling

Matt_King: That seems undesirable

howard-e: I can look into that

Matt_King: Does this color change impact all contexts? Or only high-contrast mode?

jongund: Only high-contrast mode

jongund: Depending on how you test it, you don't necessarily need Windows

jongund: In Chrome, for instance, you can use the developer tools to simulate high-contrast mode

jongund: This probably won't affect macOS users

jongund: The only place I know this pull request will make a difference is in Windows

Matt_King: So the pull request should have screenshots of the difference (before and after), and also instructions for how a reviewer can observe the difference themself

Jem: I can review once jongund adds that information

Matt_King: Okay, I'll assign you, then

Matt_King: is this a change you were just trying out for the one slider? Do you think it should be applied to the other examples if people like it?

jongund: Yes, I think we should use it elsewhere. Though we only use the "forced colors" media query in one other pattern--feed. I'd also like to add it to other patterns

Mouse behavior differences between Select-only and editable combobox

github: w3c/aria-practices#2966

Matt_King: Curt_Bellew did some work on this

<Jem> w3c/aria-practices#2966 (comment)

Matt_King: When someone changes which option is highlighted in the list of options using the keyboard. So the value isn't actually set at this moment. Then, they click outside of the combobox

Matt_King: Because the click closes the dropdown, should that impact the selected value?

Matt_King: In other words, should clicking outside be treated like "enter"/"tab" or like "escape"?

Matt_King: So we were wondering what browsers do for standard selects

Matt_King: Chrome and Firefox on macOS both return to the initial value, (treating it like "escape")

Matt_King: Windows does the opposite

Matt_King: This is not what I was expecting!

Matt_King: If we were going to have our combobox mimic the behavior based on the platform... We could do that, but it feels batty to me

[general discussion]

jongund: I don't think the behavior of the APG's combobox should be operating-system dependent

Matt_King: The select-only combobox behaves like Windows. The auto-complete combobox behaves like macOS.

Matt_King: So we have inconsistencies between our examples

Mark_McCarthy: I agree with jongund. We should choose one operating system to mimic

Bryan_Garaventa: I think the two examples should match

jongund: It seems like clicking outside the box is more like hitting "escape", conceptually

Matt_King: I agree. If the user is expressing an intent, it seems like it's "get me out of here"

Matt_King: (None of this affects screen reader users because we can't click outside of the box, even if we wanted to.)

jugglinmike: It may be that some users (particularly sighted users) don't recognize that highlighting an item is not the same as selecting it. From that perspective, it would be surprising for selection *not* to occur after clicking outside

Matt_King: It sounds like collectively, we have a preference for making this behave like "escape" (which is how the native element behaves on macOS)

Jem: In my opinion, I think it's important to have consistency in APG.

Matt_King: In terms of prioritization, I am adding the "bug" label to this issue, now

Matt_King: In terms of the severity of the bug, this is clearly not a blocking problem. It seems like a sub-3 kind of bug. It's an inconsistency, but it's an inconsistency that's hard to find

Matt_King: I'm going to label this "P3" for now; does anyone disagree?

Jem: I really don't like the inconsistency, but I'm okay with that

Select-only combobox enter key behavior

github: w3c/aria-practices#2998

Matt_King: this is another inconsistency within the APG and also an inconsistency with the native "select"

Matt_King: I don't know why we have the "enter" key expanding. Maybe it's because that's what menu buttons do

Matt_King: Do people think we should remove the "Enter to open" on the select-only combobox example?

Bryan_Garaventa: I've used that in the past

jongund: Enter has not been a past default action

Matt_King: Because our combobox is collapsed by default and because it's select-only, it has a lot of similarities with menu button

Matt_King: I have questions about the visual design of the select-only combobox

Matt_King: Does it look like a button? And can you click on a down-arrow icon to expand it? Or does it even have a down-arrow icon?

arigilmore: It has an arrow, but you can click anywhere on the box to open it

arigilmore: It's styled more like a button

Matt_King: So it looks more like a menu button than an input field

Matt_King: If you can click to expand it, then I'm thinking that pressing "enter" to expand it is analogous

Bryan_Garaventa: I would agree with that

Mark_McCarthy: Me too. As a keyboard user, it seems like it can't hurt

Matt_King: Okay, we'll stick with the "enter" key behavior and treat this as an editorial problem

Matt_King: We'll make a change to the text of the "keyboard" section of the combobox pattern

skipTo.js feature change

jongund: I spoke with some folks at Walmart about possibly adopting skipTo.js

jongund: They have a feature request which is to give feed-forward about where it will take you

Matt_King: That's exactly what we did at Facebook, and we got positive feedback from the community

Matt_King: But we didn't have developer interest in supporting it in the long term, so we eventually removed it

jongund: Would you be interested in talking with them?

Matt_King: Sure

Mark_McCarthy: I would, too

jongund: Thank you so much!

jongund: I'll make a prototype that we can review at some future date

Minutes manually created (not a transcript), formatted by scribe.perl version 221 (Fri Jul 21 14:01:30 2023 UTC).

Diagnostics

Succeeded: s/button text/buttontext/

Succeeded: s/cspell/I also had to change the cspell configuration. cspell/

Succeeded: s/think it/think the behavior of the APG's combobox/

All speakers: arigilmore, Bryan_Garaventa, howard-e, Jem, jongund, jugglinmike, Mark_McCarthy, Matt_King

Active on IRC: howard-e, Jem, jongund, jugglinmike, Matt_King