[Webkit-unassigned] [Bug 62822] New: AX: elements with contentEditable should have EditableTextRole, allow text ranges

[bugzilla-daemon at webkit.org]

https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=62822

           Summary: AX: elements with contentEditable should have
                    EditableTextRole, allow text ranges
           Product: WebKit
           Version: 528+ (Nightly build)
          Platform: Macintosh
        OS/Version: Unspecified
            Status: UNCONFIRMED
          Severity: Enhancement
          Priority: P2
         Component: Accessibility
        AssignedTo: webkit-unassigned at lists.webkit.org
        ReportedBy: justin at cam.org
                CC: cfleizach at apple.com


Accessibility support for HTML5 elements with the contentEditable attribute = true is incomplete and rather different from the treatment of textArea and textField elements. From the point of view of the user of these interfaces, there is little difference between textArea and a contentEditable div; accessibility clients should be able to handle them the same way.

1) role is StaticTextRole instead of EditableTextRole (a minor consideration, since the text is writable, but it would be better to declare the right role)

2) plain-text range support is missing. It is possible to set and get text and the selection with text marker ranges, but not plain-text ranges.

Example: MobileMe and Gmail mail compose windows use contentEditable divs for the message body. (The subject line, on the other hand, is a textField or textArea.)


This would be a cleaner way of responding to the request I made in https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=61889 (asking for text editing methods in WebKit2's WKView) or the follow-on request in rdar://problem/9544103 (which proposed addressing the issue with AppleScript support in Safari).

The behaviour described here seems to be unchanged in WebCore on Mac over a long period of time. The impetus to fix it has arisen because WebKit2 makes it very difficult to do editing by script (old WebKit at least has unsupported private Objective-C methods on WebFrame which work equally well on textAreas and contentEditable divs). These facilities need to be exposed cleanly.

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