Add aria landmark roles to Zen

We do already have a tentative mapping of ARIA roles to Core blocks at #1183042: Regression: Add WAI-ARIA roles to Core blocks. Would love some feedback and hope that it helps out here as well. You will also note a couple of decisions that have yet to be made about implementing roles in D8.

Do you want to add them via preprocess functions or directly in templates?

function zen_preprocess_block(&$vars) {

  if ($vars['block']->module == 'menu') {
    $vars['attributes_array']['role'] = 'navigation';
  }

}

Just saw comment #1, looks like that post has already done a lot of the heavy lifting, should be easy to add to Zen using that as a reference.

One of the reasons that I added the roles in preprocess functions for Core was so that they could be easily removed for themes that needed to be xhtml 1.0 compliant, as WAI-ARIA is non-compliant. However, adding the roles in templates would likely be my preferred method for a theme where I did not anticipate the roles needing to be removed.

ARIA landmark roles

• application
• banner
• complementary
• aggregator
• help
• locale
• poll
• profile
• system/poweredby
• system/help
• user/new
• user/online
• node/syndicate
• contentinfo
• form
• user/login
• main
• system/main
• navigation
• blog
• book
• comment
• forum
• menu
• shortcut
• statistics
• node/recent
• system/menus
• search
• search

patch attached includes the above roles

There is an issue around system/main wherein the main content region should likely carry role="main" and the system/main block should perhaps be without a role.

Other than that, there are likely some other things, not blocks, that require a role, such as primary and secondary links, etc.

If main is to be added to the content region, and the content region tpl.php is now bare ( region--bare.tpl.php - https://drupal.org/node/1245900 ), where would the

<?php print $attributes; ?>

go?

This is exciting. I look forward to seeing ARIA in Zen.

What is the patch built on? Is it the Git repository for Zen?

Patch was made for 7.x-5.x-dev under dev release branch in git

Any thoughts on this? I think it's an important addition, it'd be nice to get the role=main location worked out

I applied this patch to a fresh branch of Zen as pulled from:
git clone --branch 1245910-wip http://git.drupal.org/project/zen.git

This functionality is all applied from function zen_preprocess_block() which makes it easy to track

I wasn't able to find the output I expected from the template.php file. The code's there, but I should be able to easily see "role" in the source code and can't.

Forgot to tag this.

Thanks John. Would be good to get this into Zen's framework. I also appreciate the related note here:

#1183042: Regression: Add WAI-ARIA roles to Core blocks

Agreed with @JohnAlbin. Going to try to get role="main" in *page.tpl.php in Core.

So in the system module blocks, we'd be removing:

        case 'main':
        $variables['attributes_array']['role'] = 'main';
        break;

Add the role right to the page.tpl.php:

    <div id="content" class="column" role="main"><div class="section">

And likewise to the maintenance-page.tpl.php:

      <div id="content" class="column" role="main"><div class="section">

Pushing status.

"I also added role="navigation" to the main and secondary menus in the page.tpl."

Good idea, since these are not blocks and aren't otherwise covered.

Patch applies nicely. Looks like those are great enhancements. Thanks John!

Great John, thanks!