1681903 - Consider implementing WebKit's presentational heuristics for lists.

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Core :: Disability Access APIs, enhancement, P3)

Description

[Marco Zehe (:MarcoZ)]

After reading this thread by James Craig on the background of why they decided to treat obviously presentational lists as such for accessibility, filing this bug to match WebKit on the behavior. As we gain more VoiceOver users once we release, I suspect this will come up eventually. Also, we should rather be matching Safari for parity here rather than Chromium, as people will come to us with a certain set of expectations that are probably more geared towards Safari's behavior.

The code where the heuristics are implemented in WebKit is here.

Comment 1

[James Teh [:Jamie]]

This blog post by Scott O'Hara makes me question whether this is a good idea after all. I think there's also been other commentary about this on the interwebs, but I don't have links off hand.

I think there has been a general shift towards preferring HTML semantics over CSS indicators in the last decade or so; e.g. authors using table markup with wild CSS styling and still expecting semantic tables, display: contents, etc. I tend to think we should continue to shift in that direction rather than going the other way.

Comment 2

[Marco Zehe (:MarcoZ)]

I agree with your assessment, Jamie, and am OK with closing this bug. While I haven't kept close tabs on what has been going on in the web accessibility world since my retirement, I agree that semantics should overrule visual styling via CSS. I know I submitted this bug for Safari/WebKit parity on MacOS, I find myself using the "jump to lists" feature on many websites I know for quicker navigation to certain parts. And I use Firefox for that because Safari takes the lists away often enough. So, WONTFIX would be OK for me, but I'll leave it to you to make the final call.

Comment 3

[James Teh [:Jamie]]

Morgan, are you okay with wontfixing this? Just double checking because you're more familiar with Mac quirks than I.

Comment 4

[Morgan Reschenberg [:morgan]]

Sounds good to me, thanks for checking :)