Reference Target for Cross-Root ARIA

[davatron5000]

Description

There is a common footgun in web components where elements outside the shadow root (e.g. <label for="input">) are unable to reference elements inside the shadow root (e.g. <fancy-input>#shadow-root<input id="input">/#shadow-root</fancy-input>). referencetarget seeks to fix that. This negatively impacts the accessibility of shadow children.

Explainer

• WICG/web-components: https://github.com/WICG/webcomponents/blob/gh-pages/proposals/reference-target-explainer.md

Discussions

• WICG Tracking Thread Reference Target Tracking Issue WICG/webcomponents#1086
• Interop 2025 Reference Target API #792

Specification

WHATWG

web-feature

No response

Test Links

https://github.com/web-platform-tests/wpt/tree/master/shadow-dom/reference-target/tentative

Additional Signals

• Edge: Intent to Experiment https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/g/blink-dev/c/C3pELgMqzCY/m/DzCzBHPcAQAJ
• Gecko: No signal (Reference Target for Cross-Root ARIA mozilla/standards-positions#1035)
• WebKit: No signal (Reference Target for Cross-Root ARIA WebKit/standards-positions#356)

[github-actions]

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[Westbrook]

@alice is there a more spec-like document for Reference Target at this late point in our larger discussion on it?

[alice]

There are two spec PRs:

whatwg/html#10995
whatwg/dom#1353

[alice]

Obviously I'm thrilled that so many developers are eagerly awaiting this feature, but I think we should be cautious about how we proceed.

A lot of the important effects of reference target are realised in accessibility code, which has only extremely limited options for testing in WPTs - much of what reference target does can't currently be tested in WPTs at all. We may unfortunately need to consider whether this is blocked on web-platform-tests/interop-accessibility#148.