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Working around flaky browser accessibility tree

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From: Lynn Holdsworth
Date: Apr 6, 2018 9:04AM

Hi all,

Apologies if this has been discussed ad nauseum in the past, but...

I'm creating an accordion and want to use the aria-expanded attribute
on the expand/collapse buttons to flag up whether their associated
content is shown or hidden.

But Google Chrome doesn't expose this flag in its accessibility tree.
Or at least I assume that's what's happening since JAWS and NVDA can
pick it up in IE11 but not in Chrome 65.

What's the accepted work-around for issues like this, where it's the
browser or the AT that's at fault rather than the mark-up? Should we
add some hidden text into the expand/collapse button until this issue
gets fixed in Chrome, or just implement our code as-is and blame the
browser?

If our current solution (the one with no work-arounds) were subject to
a WCAG2 audit, would this aspect fail 4.1.2 since the button's state
isn't available to AT?

We want our application to be as accessible as possible, so I'm
tempted to add a work-around for now, but being a purist I find it
frustrating to have to do this :-)

Have a great weekend.

Thanks, Lynn