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Re: JAWS and disabled combobox options

for

From: Paul Collins
Date: Jan 11, 2017 9:08PM

Hi everyone, thanks for your replies, I really appreciate your input.

Bryan, your bookmarklet is a great idea, I've saved it. The decision to
disable options in a select box was not mine, it was handed to me - I'm
working on a large scale enterprise app and as you can imagine, in these
situations accessibility is often a series of compromises between UX,
Design, Product Owners, Developers, etc to work out the best solution.

However, based on everyone's feedback, I've managed to come up with a
better solution that seems to satisfy all the stakeholders involved :)

The drop down contained a list of accounts. Some were disabled
occasionally, but we wanted to communicate which ones. I've now removed all
disabled accounts from the drop down and listed them in a descriptive
warning message, associated with the selectbox using aria-describedby.

Hope that makes sense. Thanks for your input everyone, it made me rethink
the design and come up with a better solution.

All the best,
Paul


On 12 January 2017 at 05:55, JP Jamous < <EMAIL REMOVED> > wrote:

> Bryan,
> Do you have a page that I can check out? I am not following you, because
> from your description it sounded like both the States and Counties are
> loading in the same dropdown box, which cannot be correct.
>
> I know I am losing you somewhere. I do understand though that when one
> country is selected the state item should become disabled.
>
> Are the counties in a different dropdown or are they check boxes or radio
> buttons? Just trying to map out the layout in my head.
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: WebAIM-Forum [mailto: <EMAIL REMOVED> ] On
> Behalf Of Bryan Garaventa
> Sent: Wednesday, January 11, 2017 12:33 PM
> To: WebAIM Discussion List < <EMAIL REMOVED> >
> Subject: Re: [WebAIM] JAWS and disabled combobox options
>
> 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)
> Vis Visit us online: Website | Twitter | Facebook | LinkedIn | Blog See
> you at CSUN in March!
>
> The information contained in this transmission may be attorney privileged
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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
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