figure needs role="group"

[ffoodd]

As said in w3c/wai-tutorials#120 and as far as we know (from the W3C's WD) figure needs a role="group" for accessibility reasons.

I think this should be a warning. Any thought?

[Lamecarlate]

Hiya! Is this warning still relevant today? The associated links in wiki (http://references.modernisation.gouv.fr/rgaa/criteres.html#crit-1-10, http://www.w3.org/WAI/tutorials/images/decision-tree/, http://www.w3.org/TR/html51/semantics.html#alt) seem to relate to the "alt" attribute and not the "figure" element, and in the issue w3c/wai-tutorials#120 the link to WD is now dead. I can't find any recommendation about a role on "figure" element…

[ffoodd]

Hi there :) thanks for questioning!

In fact it is still needed, as seen in every tests for 1-10 criteria in RGAA v3 (the first link). Each five tests requires a <figure role="group"> parent.

And the WAI tutorial ("The alt decision tree") also uses <figure role="group"> for last cases: complex images and groups of images. In both case, the use of a <figure> element goes along a group role.

As far as I know, it's all a matter of progressive enhancement for assistive technologies: some might support roles but not tags, and the other way too…

The most recent resource I found about this is a comment on a dedicated topic of Atalan's AcceDeWeb notice (in french). For now it does not really help, but we can't know if some assistive tech nonsupporting role or figure will not start to support one.

So while a single combo of popular AT + browser still not supports the semantic of figure and figcaption, we should be adding a group role on figure.

[Lamecarlate]

OK, I totally misread the RGAA page, sorry.

Thanks for your answer! I have now good arguments to support my future pull request on https://github.com/OleVik/grav-plugin-imgcaptions :D

[ffoodd]

A pleasure to read, check, update and help to help :)
Keep going!

[sebastiangreger]

Hi. I greatly value a11y.css as a tool for quick assessment, but this warning about role="group" throws me off every time...

There is an open ticket on the referenced WAI Tutorial repo indicating that, as of 2017, ARIA 1.1 provides role="figure". Since this is the implicit ARIA role of the <figure> tag, shouldn't this be the correct role to assign, rather than overriding it with group? An investigation by Scott O'Hara and his markup recommendation seem to support that as well: https://www.scottohara.me/blog/2019/01/21/how-do-you-figure.html

PS: I summarized my "research" on the issue on my blog.