Using the form’s role attribute

[yatil]

There has been a twitter conversation that started by an Validator warning:

<form role="search">

Warning: Element form does not need a role attribute

Now I know that it violates the second rule of ARIA use:

Do not change native semantics, unless you really have to.

Yet the specifications do not facilitate that and there seems to be no indication that this behavior is wrong, for example:

• WAI-ARIA 1.0 says nothing specific about this which makes sense as it is agnostic to HTML, yet mentions that the form role is “related” although the “Superclass Role” is landmark and not form.
• WAI-ARIA 1.1 (Draft) seems to steer people in the direction of using search on forms by noting: For search facilities, authors SHOULD use the search role and not the generic form role.
• HTML5 says forms can have “any roles”
• WCAG technique ARIA11 has <form role="search"> as an example.

Now, a validator warning is not an error, and developers can chose to ignore it. On the other hand having <form role="search"> seems to feel natural for many people (including me when I first heard about the search role a few years back).

What one could do:

• Make search a subclass of form (if even possible) and get rid of the validator warning. (That may have implications in the current implementations of AT.
• Outlaw any roles on form (but presentation, I suppose) for HTML5.1 and have the validator display an error.
• (… other ideas welcome …)

At least the WCAG technique should be changed to reflect best practices (see w3c/wcag#113)). There is no indication (but it hasn’t been sufficiently tested) that <form role="search"> breaks AT support, but it feels like this is a glitch in the ARIA matrix that should be clarified.

Related: See @aardrian’s blog post on this issue: Where to Put Your Search Role

(Thanks to the input @rogerjohansson, @aardrian, @LJWatson, @stevefaulkner, @cptvitamin and others.)

[Volker-E]

"On the other hand having <form role="search"> seems to feel natural for many people (including me when I first heard about the search role a few years back)" --

@yatil I wonder why you're after laying it out like above were choosing to change to adding an extra DOM element <div role="search"> instead of making search a subclass of form. There's people out there publishing it "as specialized version of form".

Adding roles is already hard to get around for some developers (personally fighting for due to missing mapping to semantic elements by older browsers), but adding extra --otherwise superfluous-- DOM element seems illogical at best to many.

[yatil]

Hi @Volker-E – Well, that is exactly what we want to find out here. At the moment specs seem to have no clear indication if role="search" can be used on a form or not. Currently I, personal, would like to avoid the questions by using <form><div role="search"> as it provides the best of both worlds and doesn’t throw an error in the validator. I agree that it is an additional superfluous element and probably is illogical, but we won’t know until this issue is resolved.

[yatil]

Looks like this is resolved by @stevefaulkner here: w3c/html-aria#18.

[ZoeBijl]

Can this be closed?

[yatil]

I think so, feel free to close it.

[ZoeBijl]

Well if it's fixed… Let's close it up :)