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Re: Which control for deselectable, mutually exclusive options?

for

From: Mark Magennis
Date: Jan 18, 2019 7:33AM

Hi Isabel,

You could make each one a toggle button using <button>. But don't use aria-pressed if any of your users are using IE11 (which still includes most JAWS users) because IE doesn't support aria-pressed correctly. This is a pity because aria-pressed has the semantics to allow AT to report the current state and any change in state, but that doesn't happen in IE (with either JAWS or NVDA).

You can easily create a toggle button without aria-pressed by changing the button's name when its state changes to indicate the new action, e.g. from "select French" to "unslect French". Make sure the button name is an action, not the state, because button names are always actions. Provide feedback to screen reader users using aria-live, e.g. "French is selected" or "You selected French". The button would need to have the additional action of changing the status of the currently 'selected' button in the group (if there is one) to 'unselected'. You'll need to inform users up front that the group only allows one selection so that they know this will happen. If you still feel it may not be clear, consider adding information about the additional action to the screen reader feedback, e.g. "French selected and German unselected".

And don't make them look like standard radio buttons because otherwise users will think they are standard radio buttons.

Mark

Mark Magennis
Skillsoft | mobile: +353 87 60 60 162
Accessibility Specialist

-----Original Message-----
From: WebAIM-Forum < <EMAIL REMOVED> > On Behalf Of Isabel Holdsworth
Sent: 18 January 2019 11:51
To: <EMAIL REMOVED>
Subject: [WebAIM] Which control for deselectable, mutually exclusive options?

Hi there,

We have some forms where users need to choose a single answer from a
group of possible options. Radio buttons would be perfect for this
scenario.

But once the user has selected an answer, they need to be able to
deselect it if they change their mind. Radio buttons aren't
deselectable, so they're not fit for purpose.

What would be the best element to use for these forms?

We could do something fancy and create a group of options that look
like buttonms but behave like a <select> list. But speech input
doesn't tend to cope well with elements that are masked as different
element types. And hacks like this are offensive to my purist
mentality :-)

Any suggestions gratefully received.

Kind regards, Isabel