WebAIM - Web Accessibility In Mind

E-mail List Archives

Re: JAWS and disabled combobox options

for

From: Bryan Garaventa
Date: Jan 11, 2017 1:38AM

Hi,
Actually this is an extremely bad practice and breaks not only screen reader accessibility but also keyboard accessibility, making it impossible to use single or multiple letter skipping between key sections within the select within various browsers.

This was so problematic for me at times that I created the following bookmarklet to hack this out of any web page where this was done.
http://whatsock.com/training/matrices/remove_option_disabled.htm

I sincerely suggest that nobody ever do this.



Bryan Garaventa
Accessibility Fellow
SSB BART Group, Inc.
<EMAIL REMOVED>
415.624.2709 (o)
www.SSBBartGroup.com

-----Original Message-----
From: WebAIM-Forum [mailto: <EMAIL REMOVED> ] On Behalf Of Paul Collins
Sent: Tuesday, January 10, 2017 10:04 PM
To: WebAIM Discussion List < <EMAIL REMOVED> >
Subject: [WebAIM] JAWS and disabled combobox options

Hi friends.

I'm currently working on a project where individual options in a select box are disabled, using the *disabled* attribute:

*<select>*
* <option>option 1</option>*
* <option disabled>option 2</option>*
*</select>*

When using the keyboard arrow keys, it skips over each disabled option.
This also means *JAWS* doesn't read out the disabled option either.

Just wondering if anyone has tackled this and how they managed to communicate to the screen reader user that the option is there and disabled?

Thanks for any help.
Paul