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IE 11 Buggy ARIA behavior

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From: Moore,Michael (Accessibility) (HHSC)
Date: Aug 11, 2016 12:47PM

Good afternoon accessibility gods,

I am trying to track down and resolve what to me appears to be a bug in IE11.

We are building an application that is using aria-labelledby and aria-describedby to convey input labels and error messages or additional instructions to the user and are experiencing problems when we use multiple ids in the aria-labelledby attribute and when we use aria-describedby. The problem is confined to internet explorer. To confound things even further. Our IT department has conveniently reconfigured IE 11 on all of our systems and will not share what they have done for "security" purposes.

To track down the bug I created this code for a test page.

<!doctype html>
<html lang="en">
<head>
<meta charset="utf-8">
<title>Labelledby Describedby Bug</title>
</head>

<body>
<form method="post" action="">
<p id="para">This is my page</p>

<label id="pre">pre</label>


<select id="test" aria-labelledby="para pre" aria-describedby="post">
<option>male</option>
<option>female</option>
</select>

<label id="post">post</label>
</form>

</body>
</html>

My test results:

NVDA - FF Correct
NVDA - IE Reads second aria-labelledby element and the describedby element
JAWS 16 FF Correct
JAWS 16 IE - Reads both labelledby elements but does not read the describedby
JAWS 17 FF - Correct
JAWS 17 IE - Correct


I also checked the output of Aviewer - MSAA
IE accName=Pre accDescription none accRole Text
FF accName=This is my page pre accDescription=post accRole=combo box


I thought that it was very interesting that the role in IE seems to be incorrect. Also even though there is no accDescription in IE NVDA grabs it anyway.

If it is not too much trouble can someone validate my results for me to eliminate our environment as the cause of the issue? Or if you notice that there is a problem with my test markup let me know what I did wrong.

Thank you,

Mike Moore
Accessibility Coordinator