Accessibility

[Reinmar]

I wonder if and how the semantics of created highlights should be exposed to assistive technologies.

For instance – when highlights would be used to render spellchecking squiggles we should also have a way to tell the that this piece of text is misspelled. I don't know how the selection itself is rendered in the Accessibility Object Model, but I think that highlights should be able to use the same mechanism.

I'd imagine that the easiest solution may be to allow defining a highlight's title. For a misspelled fragment of text it could be set to "misspelled" (that's at least what VoiceOver reads).

[Reinmar]

cc @Comandeer

[Comandeer]

In the simplest case something like HighlightRange#label should be enough. However, if you already referenced AOM, there is proposal for virtual accessibility nodes, that are dedicated just for this case: exposing non-element nodes in accessibility tree. In such case HighlightRange interface should be updated in following manner:

partial interface HighlightRange {
	AccessibleNode attachAccessibleRoot();
}

The only part that it's worrying me a little is the fact that VANs are behaving a little like pseudoelements (they could have dimensions and position).

[gked]

moved this issue to MicrosoftEdge/MSEdgeExplainers#73