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Re: Combobox sufficiently accessibility-supported?

for

From: Bryan Garaventa
Date: Oct 11, 2015 7:13PM

> I don't think there's any particular need for consensus - all the various ATs don't have to use the same touchscreen gestures (and indeed, they don't for
> many things), but what they do need is an underlying implementation of the concept of activedescendant, and some means for a user to interact with a widget
> that uses it. Whether it be an up/down swipe, or a two- or three-finger swipe, or a more complex gesture is really up to each AT to decide.

I agree, and this would be nice if supported. A lot of these issues are coming up as we continue working on the ARIA APG 1.1 update, and touch devices are sort of a hot topic for this across various interactive widgets.

Going back to the original question though:

> Hi list,
> I did a bit of due diligence searching but the last Webaim entry mentioning the combobox is more than a year old.
> Would you still consider it best practice to avoid the combobox if favour of native selects?

With this in mind, can you identify any accessibility issues with the demo implementation that I referenced?
http://whatsock.com/tsg/Coding%20Arena/ARIA%20Comboboxes/ARIA%20Comboboxes%20(Native%20Inputs,%20Editable%20with%20Substring%20Match)/demo.htm

I really would like to know what these are, so I can improve this in the future.

Thanks,
Bryan


-----Original Message-----
From: WebAIM-Forum [mailto: <EMAIL REMOVED> ] On Behalf Of Patrick H. Lauke
Sent: Friday, October 09, 2015 6:12 PM
To: <EMAIL REMOVED>
Subject: Re: [WebAIM] Combobox sufficiently accessibility-supported?

On 10/10/2015 00:52, Bryan Garaventa wrote:
>> It is conceivable that this could be made to work though, with the
>> focus nominally remaining on the combobox' input, but
>> VoiceOver/TalkBack allowing the user to swipe up/down (same as cursor up/down) to cycle through the results/suggestions, while swiping left/right would take the user to previous/next item in the sequential focus order.
>
> That is true, and would be helpful if implemented. It doesn't say anything about this in the spec though, so achieving consensus on how it should work is debatable.

I don't believe the spec authoritively defines any user agent behavior http://www.w3.org/TR/wai-aria/ - and while we do have the best practices http://www.w3.org/TR/wai-aria-practices/ these are aimed at web content developers, and are not meant as a guide for user agent developers.

I don't think there's any particular need for consensus - all the various ATs don't have to use the same touchscreen gestures (and indeed, they don't for many things), but what they do need is an underlying implementation of the concept of activedescendant, and some means for a user to interact with a widget that uses it. Whether it be an up/down swipe, or a two- or three-finger swipe, or a more complex gesture is really up to each AT to decide.

P
--
Patrick H. Lauke

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