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]

This comment was automatically generated based on the information you provided. Please don't edit it.

No web features (from the web-features project) were found in your proposal. If your proposal doesn't correspond to a web feature, that is fine.
Otherwise, please update your initial comment to include web-features: <feature-id>.
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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.

[annevk]

The specification PRs also still need some revising. Might be a bit too early indeed.

[yulunwu2]

https://wpt.fyi/results/shadow-dom/reference-target/tentative?label=master&label=experimental&aligned&q=shadow-dom%2Freference-target%2Ftentative

[wpt-interop]

Thank you for proposing Reference Target for Cross-Root ARIA for Interop 2026.

We want to let you know it was not selected to be part of Interop this year.

On behalf of the entire Interop team, thank you for submitting it for consideration. We got many more proposals than we could include in this year's project, necessitating some difficult choices. Please note this should not be taken as a comment on the technology as a whole, or our willingness to consider it for Interop in the future. We appreciate the work you put into your proposal, and would welcome your participation in future rounds of Interop.

Posted on behalf of the Interop team.