Proposal for "dashboard" and "tile" roles

[MarioBatusic]

Description of feature request

[F2F Candidate]
More and more web applications use dashboards as their main access-point to its data and processes.

I propose a role dashboard and its sub-role tile or card as required semantics and as the startpoint on the way to future HTML elements for these already used constructs.

See further thoughts to this proposal.

Will this require a change to CORE-AAM?

Yes.

Will this require a change to the ARIA authoring guide?

Yes.

[scottaohara]

i'm a bit iffy on this proposal, but open to further explanation for the need, specifically because while this mentions keyboard navigation - which can be done with or without this role - it might be nice to figure out if there is a role or attribute that could signal to screen readers for touch devices a revised swiping behavior.

but one thing that struck me odd about this is i don't understand the comparison of a dashboard (a web page) to a dialog (a window atop a web page). The proposal even makes mention of Matt's gist on the subject of dialogs, but neither the quoted text nor the word 'dashboard' are used within Matt's doc. it feels like this is either a mixing of ideas, or something is missing to explain this comparison.

[MarioBatusic]

Hi Scott, I will try to explain better the connection between my proposal and Matt's explanation of screen reader desktop apps.

Screen readers get in the desktop apps The look&feel of a dialog for each sub-window or window area of an app. That means, you cannot go by tab / shift + tab through the whole app but you stay bound to every current focused sub-window and can use screen reader commands to go to the beginning and to the end of the area.
To focus the next / previous sub-window the user presses F6 / Shift + F6.

I hope the future step in the look & feel for web apps could also be similar for all window areas which are similar to non-modal dialogs. This could be for example "main", "dashboard" and many more due to the functionality of a web app.

The role "dashboard" would help to enable arrow navigation to all contained cards / tiles. And it is not ever the whole window representig a dashboard. In the Fabasoft Cloud it is often only a sub-window of the app.

[spectranaut]

We discussed this topic in at TPAC this week, notes here: https://www.w3.org/2023/09/11-aria-minutes#t05