Bug 142005 – AX: Should we sanity-check children of ARIA roles textbox and searchbox?

• Status: NEW
• Component: Accessibility

[Joanmarie Diggs]

While working on bug 142004, I discovered that at least some children of elements with ARIA role textbox are exposed unexpectedly (at least to me). One quick example:

    <div role="textbox"><h1>Heading</h1></div>

I'm not sure to what extent, if any, we should be sanity-checking these ARIA roles. So I'm opening this bug for discussion -- and work if we don't WONTFIX it. I'll implement searchbox support in the meantime.

[Radar WebKit Bug Importer]

<rdar://problem/19949343>

[chris fleizach]

Is textbox allowed to have children?

[Joanmarie Diggs]

(In reply to comment #2)
> Is textbox allowed to have children?

Why not? (She says having given it more thought, discussion with others, and examination of real-world, non-ARIA equivalent use cases.)

* A multi-line ARIA-roled textbox as a rich-text comment-submission field

* A single-line ARIA-roled textbox which has buttons to clear the contents, enable voice-based input, stylize/highlight errors, show results in real time.

* A searchbox in which you can drag and drop an image or some other object or rich text to find "something like this thing". (Along with the button to clear the results, choose the search provider etc.)

The more I think about it the more I think this is a WONTFIX because there's not a Right(tm) or Wrong(tm) candidate child and who knows what creative developers will come up with. <insert shrug here>

The one thing that would be worth doing I think, both here and downstream in our respective platforms, is add regression tests with a variety of things we might not expect in a search box or textbox in order to be sure we, and our platform ATs, don't spit up on them.

Thoughts?