Web map title or caption

[prushforth]

Discussed in #558

^{Originally posted by prushforth November 2, 2021}
When we listen to what a screen reader says about a map, I hear the page title and then "Application", "Interactive map", "Region", but I don't hear what the title of the map is. This seems to me to be a shortcoming, I think each map should have a title (optionally) that is announced, and potentially visible somewhere, based on author discretion.

WDYT?

[prushforth]

We are thinking about creating a <map-caption> child element for the <mapml-viewer>. The element's first job will be to generate an aria-label that is read by screen readers. We can / may evolve the functionality to allow visual rendering of the caption, based on what you can do with <figure> and <figcaption>.

We were unsure if <figure> had the appropriate semantics to wrap a map. If <map-caption> turns out to be functionally identical to <figcaption>, we can adopt the latter into our proposal. But creating the <map-caption> custom element will be a useful excercise, as well as useful for authors and especially users.