Question: time can have a name from author?

[scottaohara]

This came up because i'm looking at what HTML elements can (only) be named from author / need wpt tests, and the naming expectations for <time> vs role=time weren't as I would have initially thought, being the time element is a text-level semantic, and those largely aren't meant to be named.

Curious about the wg's thoughts on time being a namable role from authors. While browsers expose the name, VO on macOS and Narrator with Edge (specifically if using Narrator key + left/right arrows to navigate) are really the only ones that effectively expose the name - unless the element is made focusable. And then that's a weird hodgepodge of the name sometimes being announced but the role often not... but also, why would anyone be making a time element focusable?

I am not sure what need there is for a time role/element to be named. is this something that should remain / AT have bugs filed to work out UX? Or is this something that maybe shouldn't be named and it can be removed w/out much in the way of anyone noticing?

[scottaohara]

this is related to:
#683 and #2074 and #1431 and #1800 (in case anyone was curious where I'm going with these recent issues)

[spectranaut]

I'm looking at old issues and I don't see a link to minutes notes where this has been discussed -- maybe it fell through the cracks? I'm going to agenda+, unless you recall there being a meeting/takeaway.

[spectranaut]

Discussed in: https://www.w3.org/2024/05/09-aria-minutes.html#t07

[spectranaut]

@scottaohara -- role=time already has name from prohibited. Is this issue a html-aam issue only? Is there anything other than removing time from this list?

https://w3c.github.io/html-aam/#text-level-element-accessible-name-computation

[scottaohara]

apparently i went back in time and fixed this issue - #1464 (but in actuality, i was probably looking at the aria 1.2 spec where it is listed as name from author, but was updated per that PR to be prohibited in 1.3)

neat. nothing more to see here other than to work out the other issues about whether those roles should allow name from author or not.

[zcorpan]

The text content of an element with role="time" (when not the time element with a datetime attribute) is a machine-readable time, which is often not what you want to present to humans. For example, in https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2020/12/making-time-more-accessible/ there's a desire to have "1 hour ago" as the text exposed to accessibility APIs (and "1h" for visual rendering). Prohibiting name for role=time makes this unnecessarily difficult.

[scottaohara]

Hey @zcorpan, this would probably benefit from being a new issue, rather than reopening this one. Naming time may not be the best way forward here, so maybe something else closer to what abbr and the title attribute allow for should also be considered.

[zcorpan]

OK, filed #2320