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w3c
aria-owns on roles with children presentational
Describe your concern
https://github.com/w3c/aria/pull/1812:
Authors MUST NOT specify
aria-owns on an element which has Presentational Children
This means that aria-owns is no longer a global attribute. However, it is still a global attribute in the ARIA specification: https://w3c.github.io/aria/#aria-owns
In addition, aria-owns is still specified as a permitted attribute for all roles where it is no longer permitted: https://w3c.github.io/aria/#img, https://w3c.github.io/aria/#button and so on
Link to the version of the specification or documentation you were looking at at.
ARIA 1.3
Link to documentation: https://w3c.github.io/aria
Does the issue exists in the editors draft (the editors draft is the most recent draft of the specification)? Yes
Apart from the fact that I don't understand the new rule at all. In HTML there are elements that cannot have child elements such as img and br. There are also elements that can have child elements (like button), but whose child elements have no role because of Children Presentational.
However, the child elements of a button help to define the name. Instead of <button><span>Name</span></button> I could use: <button aria-owns=button></button><span id=button>Name</span> and there is no good reason to ban it now. This also works correctly in the browsers.
Of course, aria-owns makes no sense on the HTML element input type=checkbox, because the input element cannot have any child elements. But on an element with the ARIA role checkbox, aria-owns would make sense to use, because child elements are also allowed here and result in the name of the checkboxes.
The new rule would only make sense if aria-owns is not intended for child elements in the DOM, but for child elements that appear in the Accessibility API. If this is the case, however, aria-owns should not be used to refer to elements that have role=none. However, this use is not currently ruled out. Furthermore, in my opinion, there is no sensible reason to restrict aria-owns to child elements that appear in the API.
The discussion in https://github.com/w3c/aria/issues/1760 reflects on the fact it's an author error and user agents will continue to try to correct it.
@pkra If I understand https://docs.google.com/document/d/1jhztcbvUWS4_QGtKmWMxVBLnMkl5ZAAqRCVTcLfdl4o/edit correctly, this was about something completely different: HTML elements that are not allowed to have child elements. For these, aria-owns is wrong, as I already wrote above. But that has nothing to do with children presentational