Aria-sort for pager

[Valles, Heidi]

hi,

Justin and I were just chatting about adding a line of text that said "Viewing page 1. Showing records 1 - 10 of 164 items, sorted by Members column in ascending order." or something like that. It'd be a work-around... and also a fix outside of the component that would be up to the implementer to add, but it helps quickly give the demo data/functionality some context for now.

I'm still learning ARIA but could we do something similar as the progress demo where there's feedback after an action via live-region? 

Also perhaps the tooltip "Select to sort" could be more informative about the current state. "Select to sort in descending order" implies the current state is ascending for example.

h.

Heidi Valles
Accessible Software Developer
Inclusive Design Research Centre, OCAD University


________________________________________
From: fluid-work-bounces at fluidproject.org [fluid-work-bounces at fluidproject.org] On Behalf Of Justin Obara [obara.justin at gmail.com]
Sent: November 30, 2010 2:00 PM
To: Fluid Work
Subject: Aria-sort for pager

Harris and I have been looking into the following jiras, which all have to do with sorting the data in the pager component.

FLUID-3850:
After column sorted, no screen reader confirmation/indication of the fact
http://issues.fluidproject.org/browse/FLUID-3850

FLUID-3849:
No screen reader indication whether a column is/will be sorted ascending or descending
http://issues.fluidproject.org/browse/FLUID-3849

FLUID-3848:
No screen reader indication that a column has been used for sorting
http://issues.fluidproject.org/browse/FLUID-3848

Jan had suggested that we look at the aria-sort property.
http://www.w3.org/TR/wai-aria/states_and_properties#aria-sort

Harris mocked up some tests for this, but the screen readers weren't reading them back. We have confirmed that Firefox is exposing it, but it seems like the readers just aren't supporting it yet.

So the question is, what should we do? We can implement aria-sort , when the screen readers finally support it, it will work. Otherwise we could implement a work around.

I would suggest that we at least create a patch of the aria-sort implementation and if we don't commit it to trunk we should make a branch so that we have something to take to the screen reader vendors. We will definitely attempt to contact NVDA and possibly JAWS about getting it working.

Thanks
Justin