Intent to Implement: Default Accessibility Semantics for Custom Elements
Rakina Zata Amni
Contact emails
abox...@chromium.org, dom...@chromium.org, tk...@chromium.org, rak...@chromium.org
Explainer
Design docs/spec
Specification: https://github.com/whatwg/html/pull/4658
TAG review
https://github.com/w3ctag/design-reviews/issues/401
Summary
With this feature, custom element authors can use ElementInternals to set a custom element's default accessibility role, states, and properties, much like the default accessibility semantics for native elements.
Motivation
There is currently no way for a custom element author to set default custom element accessibility semantics for a custom element. They can use AOM and modify ARIA attributes on the custom element directly, however these are user-visible and user-modifiable. An example of why this is bad: if the default attributes are modified by the user, and later on they remove the attribute, the default value would not be restored.
Risks
Interoperability and Compatibility
In past discussions at web components F2F meetings, other browser vendors have been supportive of the general idea. Several representatives from other browsers are also present on the pull request thread. However, none of them have given clear signals about this specific API proposal.
In general, the feature is quite small and should be easily implementable in other browsers.
Firefox: No public signals
Edge: No public signals
Safari: No public signals
Web developers: No signals
Ergonomics
This feature is built on top of the ElementInternals API.
Activation
The API is the same as ARIA properties, but instead of modifying/getting the properties on the Element directly, the web developer would do it on ElementInternals.
Will this feature be supported on all six Blink platforms (Windows, Mac, Linux,
Chrome OS, Android, and Android WebView)?
Yes
Is this feature fully tested by web-platform-tests?
WPT pending, some in CL
Link to entry on the Chrome Platform Status