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Expected behavior for listbox selection

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From: Catt, James
Date: Dec 7, 2018 1:20PM

Hi everyone, curious to see what you all think of this issue.

We've been building a form with a listbox coded as per the ARIA guidelines, but *not* using "selection follows focus" because the selection changes the output of an aria-live region, and thus the screen reader would read out way too much every time the user changed the option. Instead, we've been requiring the user to press Enter to select the appropriate option. It works fine except with JAWS, where it causes JAWS to exit forms mode (and the user has to move focus away from the control and back before they can change the option with arrow keys again).

I'm guessing this is because JAWS expects the selection key to be Spacebar instead of Enter. The ARIA guidelines don't specify which key should be used for selecting in a single-select listbox, but for multiselect listboxes it says Spacebar. Some people on our team felt that Spacebar wasn't intuitive however, so we're leaning towards supporting both, with hidden instruction text for screen readers that says to press Spacebar (but doesn't mention Enter, even though it will work for non-JAWS users).

My questions to the group are:


1. Is spacebar, in fact, the expected/standard key for selecting in a listbox?
2. What do you think of our solution? Can you see any drawbacks to redundantly supporting Enter?

Thanks in advance for your input!

James Catt
Inclusive Design Consultant, OLB | CIBC Digital