WebAIM - Web Accessibility In Mind

E-mail List Archives

Re: Listboxes that update content

for

From: Mallory
Date: Mar 2, 2019 5:30AM

Users may get confused about custom listboxes by way of how browsers are different in real native selects:
IE fires onChange as users arrow through the options! (though it's the only one who does I believe)
The others vary on whether blur is cancelling thing or an onChange thing (or whether blur is an onChange but only if the last-focussed value is different from the previous value, which I think was Firefox).

If you want users to select with enter key then one way you could show them that blur is not the way is, post-blur, show what the selectedIndex (or whatever your listbox version of selectedIndex is) was. That is, people can go back and see what's currently selected.

_m

On Fri, Mar 1, 2019, at 5:01 PM, Jonathan Avila wrote:
> I've used update on blur before with select boxes and would not expect
> tabbing out of a select box to reset my result -- I'd want tabbing out
> to keep the item I had selected with the arrow keys. For select boxes
> use of the arrow keys generally moves focus and selection together.
> Menus are different where enter is expected to select because up/down
> arrows only focus something but not select it. So for a menu, I would
> expect on blur to cancel the menu.
>
> Jonathan
>
>