Presentational Roles Conflict Resolution - global WAI-ARIA states or properties on inherited presentational roles

[giacomo-petri]

Closes: #2233

• clarified global WAI-ARIA states or properties on inherited presentational roles
• reorganized the structure of the 3rd bullet to visually and semantically emphasize that the examples below strictly refer to this bullet. The final paragraph related to the author's responsibility is instead applicable to all points.

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[pkra]

@giacomo-petri I believe you need to rebase or cherry pick the commit from #2244

[giacomo-petri]

@pkra, it seems there are other stray end tags...

[cookiecrook]

Unassigning myself because I don't have the capacity to review a 30,000+ line diff. It won't render on GitHub because it's too large.

[jnurthen]

Unassigning myself because I don't have the capacity to review a 30,000+ line diff. It won't render on GitHub because it's too large.

Hmm yeah - We could probably review this by just looking at the commits (other than the prettier one). But it may be easier to just cherry pick them into a new PR. @spectranaut @pkra do you have any suggestions?

[pkra]

@jnurthen not sure what's going on here. The prettier action should ignore the aria spec but it seems to have formatted it.

We can try reverting the prettier commit. But if the actions are flaky, I'm wondering if it isn't time to bite the bullet and activate prettier on the ARIA spec as well (and update all PRs). Since I did that manually for the PRs from other specs, I should be able to do this for ARIA.

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[pkra]

I reversed the prettier commit, rebased on main, and force-pushed here. It looks like this solved the prettier problem.

@giacomo-petri, @jnurthen, @scottaohara, @cookiecrook could please take another look?

[pkra]

@giacomo-petri I've rebased on main.

[spectranaut]

@giacomo-petri does this need tests?

[giacomo-petri]

• WPT tests created: https://github.com/web-platform-tests/wpt/pull/54126
• Results available here: https://wpt.fyi/results/wai-aria/role/role/role_none_conflict_resolution.tentative.html?label=pr_head&max-count=1&pr=54126

Note:

When I originally wrote this PR, I believe browsers were not exposing the roles of children within elements assigned a presentational role. Now that all major browsers do expose the content of such children, should we update the phrasing in this PR from:

Conversely, if the presentational role is inherited

to something like:

Conversely, if the element has a required accessibility parent role and that parent has a presentational role

or something similar?

[giacomo-petri]

@front-endian,

sorry, I wasn't able to work on this earlier. I've revisited this ticket after a couple of weeks (which actually helped), since I was able to review it with a fresh perspective and without the prior context.

I noticed that the second sub-bullet under "If an element has global WAI-ARIA states or properties…" is "out of scope" for that section. The section's description states:

User agents MUST NOT expose elements having explicit or inherited presentational roles in the accessibility tree, with these exceptions.

However, the second sub-bullet says:

User agents MUST NOT expose the element's role,

which contradicts the section's intent (it's not an exception).

I've updated the wording as follows:

• specified that if an element has global WAI-ARIA states or properties and the presentational role is explicit, user agents MUST ignore the none/presentation role and instead expose the element's implicit role.
• added a new bullet stating that if an element has only non-global, role-specific WAI-ARIA states or properties, the presentational role is inherited, and an explicit non-presentational role is applied, then user agents MUST ignore the inherited presentational role and instead expose the element's explicit role.
• Moved the "However…" part into a note, since it's not part of the exceptions.
• Moved the "Inherited presentational role: User agents MUST NOT expose the element's role…" sentence into a note as well, since this too isn't part of the exceptions.

Note: I've kept the original proposal as Option 1 for reference. The new version is Option 2. If the new proposal addresses everyone's concerns, I'll remove Option 1.

Thanks!

[giacomo-petri]

I recently realized that I also need to address the following case:

<ul role="none">
    <li role="none" aria-describedby="test" data-testname="presentational roles conflict - ul[role=none] &gt; li[aria-describedby]" class="ex-generic">a</li>
    <li aria-describedby="test">b</li>
    <li aria-describedby="test">c</li>
  </ul>

This works as expected across all UA, but the current behavior is not aligned with the specification (both the current one and the version I proposed).

According to the current specifications, the first list item should technically be exposed with a listitem role. However, in practice, all major user agents correctly treat it as presentational, which is also the intended behavior. So I'll need to apply one more small adjustment.