Count form as a landmark even without label?

[matatk]

According to the ARIA spec:

Authors should provide a visible label for the form referenced with aria-labelledby.

but also

User agents should treat elements with the role of form as navigational landmarks.

Currently this extension considers a form region type (either implicitly from being a <form> element, or by having role="form") to be a form only if it has a label (which means either aria-label or valid aria-labelledby attribute).

Should either of the following happen...

• Consider all forms as forms;
• only consider forms as forms if they have a valid aria-labelledby label, or
• keep things as-is (forms are considered forms if they have aria-label or aria-labelledby)?

[matatk]

Whilst the spec has a preferred way to provide labels - visually, using aria-labelledby (which is clearly better for all users) - some sites may still use aria-label, and therefore it's even more important that this extension shows up those labels.

The main question is: should an unlabelled form show up as a landmark? This is a bit harder to answer: according to the spec, unlabelled forms probably should be counted as landmarks, but this might end up reporting too many landmarks on some pages? Is that my decision to make? Probably not...

(With region it's much more clear: the spec says all regions must be labelled, so not counting unlabelled regions as landmarks, as is currently the case, is the right thing to do.)

[matatk]

A further thought: if application should still be supported, because it's out there in the wild, then it too is a "should label" as opposed to a "must label", so in that case, I'm leaning towards supporting application and form without labels, and region only with a label. Will desist for now, though :-).

[matatk]

Having discussed with colleagues (thanks!) and looked at how other ATs work, it seems sensible that both forms and regions are only considered landmarks when they are labelled, so even though the spec is perhaps unclear, I'm sticking with the way ATs handle this for now (too much noise in landmarks would negate their purpose).

[matatk]

Related issue in ARIA spec: w3c/aria#514