4.1 Merged state attributes supporting accessibility

To generate the requirements a mapping was completed between between MSAA and GAP accessibility state information. All state information which should be generated by the user agent vs. the script, such as showing are omitted.

These requirements have been reviewed by Peter Korn and Bill Haneman at Sun and agreement was reached with the WAI PF working group.

Proposed State Attributes	Definition	Implied document states today	MSAA, GAP, Cocoa	Questions/comments
activewindow	Indicates a window is currently the active window.	N	GAP Cocoa	Sun is OK with this
animated	The element's appearance changes rapidly or constantly. This state is used to indicate that the element's location is changing.	N	MSAA
busy	Indicates that the element cannot receive input vs. not editable.	N	MSAA,GAP
*checked	Replaced by the value property.	Y	MSAA,GAP	When included with role, may be replaced by the value property. Which would be true in this case.
collapsed	Children of this element are hidden. Allows for progressive disclosure of children.	N	All	GAP's name is “expandable”. The mapping is straight forward for GAP. The bridge mapping layer would simply translate the state information accordingly.
*default	The default state applies to a UI element that is the default among a set of similar elements. Typically applies to context menu items and buttons. One example is the default submit button among a set of buttons.	Y	MSAA	MSAA treats this as the default button with focus in a window. However, this should be expanded to meet a web page as the CSS working group has already defined.
*enabled, *disabled	The purpose of the enabled state is to allow authors to customize the look of user interface elements which are enabled - which the user can select/activate in some fashion (e.g. clicking on a button with a mouse). There is a need for such a state because there is no way to programmatically specify the default appearance of say, an enabled input element without also specifying what it would look like when it was disabled. Similar to enabled, disabled allows the author to specify precisely how a disabled or inactive user interface element should look. It should be noted that most elements will be neither enabled nor disabled. An element is enabled if the user can either activate it or transfer the focus to it. An element is disabled if it could be enabled, but the user cannot presently activate it or transfer focus to it.	Y	All	GAP supports disabled and sensitive. Bill Haneman believes there is redundancy with sensitive in GAP. Will use standard because already in place. GAP mapping can address inconsistencies.
expanded	Children of this element are displayed.	N	All
*focus	state applies while an element has the focus (accepts keyboard or mouse events, or other forms of input).	Y	All	Note: Corresponds to focused in MSAA and GAP. This applies to other forms of input besides the keyboard. This is needed for device independence. Focus is used vs. focused as this is already in the CSS3 Basic UI module.   Bill: Distinction between keyboard focus and other kinds of focus is needed, if we overload this term, for on screen keyboard clients. Rich to Working Group: This is a problem. on most systems this means keyboard and not mouse. We need to discuss.
focusable	The element is in the active window and is capable of receiving focus. Receiving focus means it can respond to keyboard input when it has focus.	N	All	This has proven very useful, especially for text navigation and for onscreen keyboards. From a style sheet perspective, the page author may wish to indicate this.
haspopup	Element displays a pop-up menu or window when invoked.	N	MSAA	Note: In GAP we expose this information as a relationship between objects, with the POPUP_FOR relationship. Would be valuable to use this information to establish a GAP relationship.
horizontal	Indicates the orientation of this element is horizontal. If JavaScript were used to render a horizontal/vertical scroll bars or progress bars this would be of value.	N	GAP, Cocoa	Microsoft hard codes an object ID for this which limits the MSAA to a standard Windows scroll bar implementation. Use of state is a better implementation.
iconified	Indicates this element is minimized and is represented only by an icon	N	GAP, Cocoa
*indeterminate	Indicates that the state of a three-state check box or tool bar button is not determined. The check box is neither checked nor unchecked and is therefore in the third or mixed state.	N	MSAA, GAP	Replaces mixed for MSAA as is a close match to GAP and is already provided for in the CSS3 Basic UI specification. This state could be used for more than a 3-state control (e.g. 4+ state).  It is the state that is indeterminant, though the data referred to may be mixed.
invisible, visible	The element is programmatically hidden or made visible. For example, menu items are programmatically hidden until a user activates the menu. Because elements with this state are not available to users, client applications should not communicate information about the element to users.	N	MSAA, GAP	There is either one or both on either platform.
*invalid; valid	An element is :valid or :invalid when it is, respectively, valid or invalid with respect to the bound instance data constraints. An element which lacks data validity semantics is neither :valid nor :invalid. This is different from an element which otherwise has no constraints. Such an element would always be valid.	Y	GAP	GAP provides an invalid state. There is nothing in MSAA.
linked; visited	Indicates that the element is formatted as a hyper link.	N	MSAA	MSAA :linked, traversed – MSAA This will be useful to map non-link elements that are simulated as links in JavaScript to GAP as well.
managesdescendents	Indicates that "active-descendant-changed" event is sent when children become 'active' (i.e. are selected or navigated to onscreen). Used to prevent need to enumerate all children in very large containers, like tables.	N	GAP	Questions: Can a "style" be applied here? Can someone give me a use case for this wrt. JavaScript generated content on a web page. PETER:this is commonly associated with transient (an object with transient children often [should] manage its descendents). BILL: Vital for spreadsheets and other objects with a large number of children. Very possibly needed for big JavaScript tables.
marqueed	Indicates scrolling or moving text or graphics.	N	MSAA
moveable	Indicates that the element and its children can be moved such as for dragging or dragging and dropping.	N	MSAA
multiselectable	Indicates this element allows more than one of its children to be selected at the same time.	N	MSAA, GAP	Working group decided to use multiselectable. And remove :extselectable. (MSAA)
multiline, single line	Indicates this (text) element can contain multiple lines of text. This should be limited to text fields and text areas but not general free-form text.	N	GAP	This has been helpful for GAP. Important when determining what keyboard navigation model to use, and in some other cases (for instance, TAB behaves differently in the two cases for most toolkits)
pressed	Indicates the element is pressed. B10	N	MSAA, GAP
*read-only, *read-write	Indicates the user can change the contents of this element or not.	Y	MSAA, GAP	Replaces read-only in MSAA and editable from GAP.
resizeable	Indicates the size of this element is not fixed and therefore may be resized. For example, a user could change the size of a window by clicking the border with a mouse and dragging the mouse. This would also apply to resizing a column in a spreadsheet.	N	MSAA, GAP	MSAA calls it sizeable. This is different from the dictionary meaning.
secret	Used to provide the user with the ability to supply information to the system in a manner that makes it difficult for someone, other than the user, who may be observing the process to discern the value that is being supplied. A common use is for password entry.	N	MSAA	MSAA supports protected. GAP has a notion of a Secret Role that is used by Open Office. XForms makes use of a secret element and HTML 4.0 makes use of a password attribute. Comment: this would be valuable when processing a form if you were blind. If you tabbed to the field you could determine this information right away. It might be useful to GAP later on for things like 'secret' spread sheet cells too, though the semantics need to be clarified.
selectable	Indicates this element accepts selection.	N	MSAA,GAP	GAP is more explicit by referring to a child hierarchy. This is too restrictive. For example we may want to apply selected to a table cell row or column. BILL: I think we need to keep this state on a per-object basis; if we need different semantics for rows/columns I would prefer a different (additional) state.
selected	Indicates the element is selected.	N	MSAA, GAP	GAP is more explicit by referring to a child hierarchy. This is too restrictive. For example we may want to apply selected to a table cell row or column. BILL: I think we need to keep this state on a per-object basis; if we need different semantics for rows/columns I would prefer a different (additional) state.
selfvoicing	The element or child uses text-to-speech (TTS) technology for description purposes. A speech-based accessibility aid does not announce information when an element with this state has the focus because the element automatically announces information.	N	MSAA	This would be helpful in the case of an audio style sheet. It prevents an assistive technology from reading something that is already being spoken. Furthermore, if a self-voicing document element was present, such as a self voicing applet, this would be very helpful to coordinate speaking or not speaking of the applet.
vertical	Indicates the orientation of this element is vertical. If JavaScript were used to render a horizontal/vertical scroll bars or progress bars this would be of value.	N	GAP, Cocoa	Microsoft hard codes an object ID for this which limits the MSAA to a standard Windows scroll bar implementation. Use of state is a better implementation.
unavailable	Indicates the element is unavailable.	N	MSAA	Could be valuable on a page basis such as when the page is waiting on a web service to complete a form submittal. The rendering may be a please wait indicator or some color combination.
Additional state information corresponding to CSS3 Basic UI specification.
*active	Applies while an element is being activated by the user. For example, between the times the user presses the mouse button and releases it.	Y	None	These are not in MSAA or GAP. This is the GAP state ARMED. GAP will need to MAP this to ARMED.
*hover	Applies while the user designates an element (with some pointing device), but does not activate it. For example, a visual user agent could apply this state when the cursor (mouse pointer) hovers over a box generated by the element. User agents not supporting interactive media do not have to support this pseudo-class. Some conforming user agents supporting interactive media may not be able to support this pseudo-class (e.g., a pen device). Author should also implement active at the same time.	Y	None	Rich: Hover simply means to apply a style when the mouse is over the object. You would probably require the developer to indicate active at the same time.  This would be mapped to hottracked in MSAA. Page author should also implement “active” when this is turned on.
*in-range, *out-of-range	Apply only to elements that have range limitations. An element is :in-range or :out-of-range when the value that the element is bound to is in range or out of range of the visual representation of the element respectively. E.g. a slider element with a value of 11 on a slider that only represents the values from 1-10 is :out-of-range. In summary: an element is :out-of-range when it does not accurately reflect the state of the model.	Y	None
*optional, required	If a value for each is, respectively, required or optional before the form it belongs to is submitted. Elements that are not form elements are neither required nor optional. This spec does not defined what is a form element.	Y	None	Recommend this be added to GAP or MSAA derivative.

4.2 References

CSS3 Basic User Interface Module

CSS3 Selectors

Microsoft Active Accessibility (MSAA) state information

Gnome Accessibility Project (GAP) State and StateSets.

5.0 Acknowledgements