Re: Purpose of Subroles
Re: Purpose of Subroles
- Subject: Re: Purpose of Subroles
- From: Mike Engber <email@hidden>
- Date: Wed, 28 Apr 2004 10:04:42 -0700
A subrole is intended to convey that a widget conforms to the standard
role (attributes, actions, ...) but is special in some way. Window
subroles are to help you differentiate floating windows, dialogs, ...
Some subroles might indicate that this particular widget has an extra
attribute.
We discourage people from inventing subroles for the same reason we
discourage inventing roles. It still requires special code in the
assistive apps to utilize the fact that there's a subrole. I don't
think I can over emphasize how much better everyone's life will be if
you stick to standard roles and subroles.
That being said, it's preferable to invent a subrole than a role. That
way assistive apps will at least handle the ui element as well as they
handle other widgets of the same role.
I don't have any definite criteria to give you, but bear in mind that a
lot of non-standard aspects of a widget aren't very important to expose
to accessibility - i.e. no subrole is needed. We try to use them
judiciously:
- mainly in cases where this extra info is impossible (or very
difficult) to deduce otherwise
- sometimes (e.g. NSAccessibilityIncrementArrowSubrole,
NSAccessibilitySearchFieldSubrole) when there's a very common subtype
of a widget that we think assistive apps might want to handle specially
-ME
On Apr 28, 2004, at 12:38 AM, Daniel Peek wrote:
In theory you could have a widget with role "button" and subrole
"Crazy Animation Button". This way, a screen reader could treat the
widget like a button, but announce it as a "Crazy Animation Button".
Dan Peek (Beaver)
"Great question! Additionally, why would you use a sub role instead of
just defining a custom role?
David Weiss"
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