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Re: How useful is the datalist element?

for

From: Jeremy Echols
Date: May 30, 2017 8:34AM

I'm using it pretty much exactly like the w3schools page (https://www.w3schools.com/tags/tag_datalist.asp), except that I've also got an aria-describedby in there. Their "try it yourself" page seems to have the same problem mine has: too much context is re-read on each use of the down-arrow.

And then there's *zero* Safari support for some reason, which makes it just a standard input box for anybody using Apple products.

I tried out an "accessible combobox" from http://oaa-accessibility.org/examplep/combobox2/, and it actually seems to be worse; NVDA just reads the top two items from the list without notifying me as I scroll through it.

It just seems like the "combo box" concept has been around so long there has to be something that works. But the datalist element falls short. At least for now.