Skip to content

clarification: text nodes and allowed accessibility child roles #2929

New issue

Have a question about this project? Sign up for a free GitHub account to open an issue and contact its maintainers and the community.

Sign up for GitHub

By clicking “Sign up for GitHub”, you agree to our terms of service and privacy statement. We’ll occasionally send you account related emails.

Already on GitHub? Sign in to your account

Open
pkra wants to merge 1 commit into
base: main
Choose a base branch
from
Open

clarification: text nodes and allowed accessibility child roles #2929

Changes from all commits
Commits
Show all changes
1 commit
Select commit
File filter

Filter by extension

Filter by extension
Conversations
Failed to load comments.
Loading
Jump to
Jump to file
Failed to load files.
Loading
Diff view
Diff view
6 changes: 4 additions & 2 deletions index.html
View file
Open in desktop
Original file line number Diff line number Diff line change
Expand Up @@ -1178,8 +1178,10 @@ <h3><dfn>Prohibited</dfn> States and Properties</h3>
<h3>Allowed Accessibility Child Roles</h3>
<p>
A list of roles which are allowed on an <a>accessibility child</a> of the element with this <a>role</a>. If the list is not empty, authors MUST only add <a>accessibility children</a> with
allowed roles. For example, an element with the role <rref>list</rref> allows <a>accessibility children</a> with the role <rref>listitem</rref>, but does not allow
<a>accessibility children</a> with the role <rref>option</rref>. If the list is empty, then there are no restrictions on accessibility child roles.
allowed roles; in particular, text nodes are not allowed in this case. If the list is empty, then there are no restrictions on accessibility children; in particular, text nodes are allowed in this case.

@cookiecrook cookiecrook Oct 23, 2026

Copy link
Copy Markdown
Contributor

Choose a reason for hiding this comment

The reason will be displayed to describe this comment to others. Learn more.

So

<ul> 
  <li>this is allowed</li>
  this is not allowed
</ul>

but…

<ul> 
  this is allowed by ARIA because there is no list item? 
</ul>

Any prose clarification should explain why. Presumably you may have been thinking about an example like this?

<ul> 
  loading…
</ul>

But I'm not sure from diff alone. Nor am I certain why text nodes were called out separately from a paragrpagh node, for example.

@pkra pkra Oct 24, 2026

Copy link
Copy Markdown
Member Author

Choose a reason for hiding this comment

The reason will be displayed to describe this comment to others. Learn more.

    this is allowed by ARIA because there is no list item?

No, list (only) has listitem in its allowed child roles, so text nodes are not allowed.

</p>
<p>For example, an element with the role <rref>list</rref> allows <a>accessibility children</a> with the role <rref>listitem</rref>, but does not allow
<a>accessibility children</a> with the role <rref>option</rref>. Reversely, an element with the role <rref>article</rref> has no restrictions and can contain any combination of elements and text nodes permitted by the host language.

@cookiecrook cookiecrook Oct 23, 2026

Copy link
Copy Markdown
Contributor

Choose a reason for hiding this comment

The reason will be displayed to describe this comment to others. Learn more.

"…except for option?" Again. I think this is confusing enough that it should explain why.

@pkra pkra Oct 24, 2026

Copy link
Copy Markdown
Member Author

Choose a reason for hiding this comment

The reason will be displayed to describe this comment to others. Learn more.

I don't understand the "…except for option?" bit. Could you elaborate what part is confusing? (Is it perhaps mostly the unchanged language with the list/option example?)

</p>
<p>
Descendants which are not children of an element ancestor are not constrained by <em>allowed accessibility child roles</em>. For example, an <code>image</code> is not an
Expand Down
Loading