ARIA Working Group Work Flow

Introduction

Historically, the ARIA Working Group placed its primary focus on defining all of the features intended for authors, leaving platform accessibility API mappings, implementations, testing, and authoring guidance as tasks to be completed after those features had been defined and the associated specification entered Candidate Recommendation. This approach proved problematic:

In order to minimize the occurrence of such problems in the future, the ARIA Working Group agreed to adopt a work flow proposed at TPAC 2017 designed to see each proposed feature through to completion, with ARIA features, mappings, implementation, testing, and authoring guidance happening together. That agreed-upon work flow is described in this document.

Work flow

For each ARIA feature:

  1. Create / modify a single ARIA feature in a working branch of the specification repository.
  2. Obtain platform mappings for that feature from platform mapping maintainers and add in a working branch of the mappings repository.
  3. Create test file(s) for that feature and add to the web-platform-tests repository.
  4. Execute tests and obtain test results for that feature and add to the test-results repository.
  5. If tests report failures, double-check that the mapping, test file, and test methodology are correct. If so, file bugs against user agents for that feature and track progress via periodic retesting.
  6. Solicit assistive technology implementations for that feature.
  7. Write authoring guidance for that feature in a working branch of the authoring practices repository.
  8. When a feature meets the criteria for readiness, merge working branch related to the feature into the stable branch of the respective repositories.

Criteria for “Readiness” of an ARIA Feature

Implications of the Work Flow on Drafts and Branches

Specifications and Notes should, as a general rule, follow this approach to including features and maintaining branches:

Version Completion and Advancement to Candidate Recommendation

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