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Re: Does role="combobox" eat the identity of nested elements?

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From: Steve Green
Date: Sep 7, 2019 8:50AM

If you are referring to the examples at https://www.w3.org/TR/wai-aria-practices-1.1/#combobox, my advice is not to use any of them. They might be compliant in theory, but they give a truly horrible and incomprehensible user experience. Using JAWS 2019, the behaviour is different in each browser, but it's bad in all of them. It would take hours to describe all the issues, so I suggest people just try it for themselves.

Part of the problem is that the design patterns are trying to be too clever. They all include autocomplete, but most authors don't want that - they just want to replicate the exact behaviour of a native combobox. None of the design patterns does this, and there is no point adding extra features such as autocomplete or grid popups until they do. Is this too much to ask for?

Steve Green
Managing Director
Test Partners Ltd