aria-owns

[Dominic Mazzoni]

The canary channel of Google Chrome now has support for aria-owns rearranging the accessibility tree internally, so AT doesn't have to implement support. It allows you to use aria-owns to do just about any arbitrary rearranging.

This wasn't my idea - I decided to implement it because I believe Mozilla already indicated interest in trying this approach too. See this bug: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1133213

I made this demo page showing off some of the cool things you can do with aria-owns now:

http://dmazzoni-google.github.io/aria-owns-demos/

Here are some of the decisions I made. I'm happy to reconsider any of these, but I wanted to just throw something out there useful as a starting point for discussions.

* If a node has natural children and also has aria-owns, the aria-owns children come last. Totally arbitrary but seems more useful than not allowing this. I don't think authors should depend on them coming last but I do think it should be allowed to do this if you don't care about the order.

* The order of aria-owns children is significant; you can use it to reorder the natural children of a node.

* It will not allow cycles. If you do author a cycle, you shouldn't count on consistent behavior; which nodes actually end up owned by other nodes within that cycle will be arbitrary and may change from one page load to another.

* It will not allow a node to own an ancestor of itself, whether part of a cycle or not.

* It ignores a node trying to own itself.

* If there are two elements with the same id, it will own whatever document.getElementById() returns.

* If two nodes try to own the same id, it's an author errors; it's arbitrary which one wins and may change from one page load to another.

Finally:

* It keeps track of ids that are referenced by aria-owns but whose ids haven't been found in the document. When an element appears in the document with an id or an element's id changes, it does a quick hash lookup to see if any elements with aria-owns need to be updated.

* The correct notifications are fired when a node gets reparented due to dynamically changing aria-owns.

I'm sure I missed something. Bug reports welcome!

[Alexander Surkov]

Btw, we've got it implemented in Firefox 45.

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[Dominic Mazzoni]

I just tested it in a Firefox nightly build and it worked perfectly for me. Well done!

[Alexander Surkov]

Awesome! Thank you for giving it a try!