Intent to Ship: aria-actions

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Jacques Newman

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5:05 PM (5 hours ago) 5:05 PM
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Specification
Summary
Support aria-actions attribute. There is a common UI pattern where secondary actions are placed within composite interactive widgets. The aria-actions attribute allows us to expose these secondary action buttons directly for improved discoverability.

Blink component
Web Feature ID
Motivation
Many common UI patterns today involve the concept of "secondary actions", such as the close button on a tab. AT discovery of these related actions is a common pain point, for example, when a screen reader user focuses on a tab, they should be made aware of any associated controls, such as the close button.

Initial public proposal
TAG review
Explanation for why this meets the exception criteria:
* The specification in ARIA has largely been accepted, with only a single issue under discussion, and this issue is not web-facing. All parties are in agreement with the web-facing side of the API.
* This has already shipped in Firefox.

TAG review status
Not applicable

Risks

Interoperability and Compatibility
This is already shipped in Firefox, and webkit has a prototype implementation.

Gecko: Shipped/Shipping (https://github.com/mozilla/standards-positions/issues/1422) Firefox has already shipped this feature.

WebKit: In development (https://github.com/WebKit/standards-positions/issues/686) Webkit has a prototype implementation of the feature: https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=306476

Web developers: Positive FluentUI is ready to add usage of the feature once it is available.

WebView application risks
Does this intent deprecate or change behavior of existing APIs, such that it has potentially high risk for Android WebView-based applications?
No


Debuggability
This feature has the same DevTools debugging support as other aria idref properties, with the reflected value shown to point to the target of the reference.

Will this feature be supported on all six Blink platforms (Windows, Mac, Linux, ChromeOS, Android, and Android WebView)?
Not in 151 when the feature initially ships.
Not yet implemented on ChromeOS or Android, but nothing stops us from rolling out on those platforms later.
As this is a discovery mechanism, sites won't have any breaking behavior when the feature is unsupported.

Is this feature fully tested by web-platform-tests?
Not Fully tested but is partially tested.
https://wpt.fyi/results/wai-aria/aria-actions WPTs covering the validation and user agent MUSTS from the spec are written, but the end-to-end flow of the feature is not currently testable via these tests as they rely on platform specific APIs. This remaining set of functionality will eventually be possible to test via the aamtest framework that is under development which currently only has limited support on some platforms.

Flag name on about://flags
No information provided

Finch feature name
AriaActions

Rollout plan
Will ship enabled for all users

Requires code in //chrome?
False

Tracking bug
Availability expectation
Feature is already available in Firefox, and is available behind a flag in Safari.

Adoption expectation
Fluent at Microsoft is ready to begin adopting the feature within a month of it being available in chromium.

Adoption plan
Given that this feature is a discovery mechanism for already-accessible controls: in most situations, there is no need for developers to use a polyfill or other compatibility mechanism. The API is purely additive, making it easy for developers to start using it without needing to have a behavior change for platforms or browsers that lack support.

Non-OSS dependencies
Does the feature depend on any code or APIs outside the Chromium open source repository and its open-source dependencies to function?
No

Non-OSS dependencies

Does the feature depend on any code or APIs outside the Chromium open source repository and its open-source dependencies to function?

No

Estimated milestones
Shipping on desktop
151


Anticipated spec changes
Open questions about a feature may be a source of future web compat or interop issues. Please list open issues (e.g. links to known github issues in the project for the feature specification) whose resolution may introduce web compat/interop risk (e.g., changing to naming or structure of the API in a non-backward-compatible way).
https://github.com/w3c/aria/issues/2691 is the only remaining aria-action issue that is still under discussion. This issue is tracking if focus should be made to stay on the element that has the aria-actions attribute when an associated action is used, and if it is, this issue tracks the mechanism that will ensure focus doesn't move from the user's perspective, this will be either a user agent or AT requirement. No matter the resolution, we agree that web authors should have no expectation or assumption around the specific behavior (by design) and therefore this is not a compatibility risk.

Link to entry on the Chrome Platform Status
Links to previous Intent discussions
This intent message was generated by Chrome Platform Status.


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