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Slightly OT: understanding screen reader interaction with Jquery select elements

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From: Alex Hall
Date: May 31, 2016 6:03AM

Hi list,
This is slightly off topic, possibly, but if anyone will know, it will be
people here. I was told last week by a sighted person that the two select
lists in my form don't close when you click outside of them (likely
explaining why onChange never fires). What I'm wondering, though, is how I
could ever have known that. I use NVDA, and it seems to interact with
select lists just fine; it reads the options as I arrow, and reads the
selected option when I tab over it again. I never knew there was a problem.
In fact, the collapsed list is a visual blank, but NVDA reads an option for
me, so I didn't know that was a problem either.

Visually, how do these things usually work? Do users click them, click the
option, and click outside of them? Do they collapse on their own when they
blur? It seems that Jquery messes with the normal setup for these, so I'll
have to re-create it, but I don't know exactly what to re-create. Thanks
for any explanations, and I hope this has made sense.

--
Alex Hall
Automatic Distributors, IT department
<EMAIL REMOVED>