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Re: JAWS and disabled combobox options

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From: Bryan Garaventa
Date: Jan 11, 2017 11:33AM

Hi,
This does come up in large more complex select fields quite often, though not so much for the standard day to day usage.

Here is an example that demonstrates the scenario.

There is a select element that includes options for all of the counties in the United States, and at the start of each county list is an option element that includes the State name that this section belongs to. E.G California.

Since it's only valid to submit the field when a county is selected, but not when a State name is selected, some developers will disable the State name option element.

The result of this however is that it then makes it impossible to quickly jump to the beginning of these sections by pressing a letter such as "c" to jump to california, and it makes it impossible to even read the State name when arrowing up and down, making it impossible to determine which section you are even in.

It was this type of scenario that drove me to create the bookmarklet because dealing with this type of situation daily was driving me nuts.




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 JP Jamous
Sent: Wednesday, January 11, 2017 8:52 AM
To: 'WebAIM Discussion List' < <EMAIL REMOVED> >
Subject: Re: [WebAIM] JAWS and disabled combobox options

I am following this post and thinking of it as I don't have the time to test it. I want to fall back to Windows Development for a second to address it.

When a list view or combo box loaded data from a DB, programmers and I always repopulated the items from the DB or an array in the RAM. The question becomes, why do you want to disable a dropdown item if there is no way to interact with it? Simply remove it by using style="display: none;" Problem solved.

-----Original Message-----
From: WebAIM-Forum [mailto: <EMAIL REMOVED> ] On Behalf Of Jonathan Avila
Sent: Wednesday, January 11, 2017 10:24 AM
To: WebAIM Discussion List < <EMAIL REMOVED> >
Subject: Re: [WebAIM] JAWS and disabled combobox options

> 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?

The support of aria-disabled doesn't seem to work correctly in my tests with IE and JAWS. But it does seem to be communicated in Firefox. You would then need to communicate somehow visually that the option was disabled as well -- perhaps with some styling?

Jonathan

Jonathan Avila
Chief Accessibility Officer
SSB BART Group
<EMAIL REMOVED>
703.637.8957 (Office)
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-----Original Message-----
From: WebAIM-Forum [mailto: <EMAIL REMOVED> ] On Behalf Of Paul Collins
Sent: Wednesday, January 11, 2017 1:04 AM
To: WebAIM Discussion List
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