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Re: Expected behavior for listbox selection

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From: Mohith BP
Date: Dec 10, 2018 3:34AM

Hi James Catt,

In my experience I feel your team is right spacebar selecting option
in an single select is counter intuit.
The HTML <select> options are also selected with enter and mostly
users expect enter to select the option on web.

I think your approach is fine unless the hidden extra information is
read by all the screen readers in the end and it is not too verbose.
It would be good if the screen reader reads it only once when focus is
set on the list box. May be through aria-describedby.

I think JAWS users should not be moving to another element and come
back to the listbox in order to change the selection as pressing enter
again should turn on the forms mode and the focus will be on the
selected option.


Thanks & Regards,
Mohith B. P.

On 12/8/18, Catt, James < <EMAIL REMOVED> > wrote:
> 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
>
> > > > >