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Re: ARIA role changing browser behavior

for

From: Birkir R. Gunnarsson
Date: Dec 4, 2023 5:17PM

Are there any differences in the keyboard operation if the screen
reader is not running?

On 12/4/23, Jim Allan < <EMAIL REMOVED> > wrote:
> Birkir
> The control was announced as a list box after the role was added. when I
> hit enter on a focused item, it was actually selected.
> Previously, before adding the role, items were announced when focused but
> the enter key did not select the focused item.
> The browser in question is Edge.
> Jim
>
> On Mon, Dec 4, 2023, 5:12 PM Birkir R. Gunnarsson <
> <EMAIL REMOVED> > wrote:
>
>> Did the keyboard behavior also changed when you updated the ARIA role
>> or did it only affect the screen reader announcement of the widget?
>> If the keyboard behavior (with or without screen reader running)
>> changed, that's certinly a departure from the classic principal of
>> "ARIA affects presentation but not functionality".
>> That being said, individaul browser vendors may decide to handle ARIA
>> roles in certain ways, even attach default keyboard behaviors to them,
>> there's nothing that forbids them from doing that.
>> Is this change confined to a single browser or can you reproduce it in
>> multiple browsers?
>>
>> On 12/4/23, Jeremy Echols < <EMAIL REMOVED> > wrote:
>> > Impossible to be certain without seeing the code, but your supposition
>> > is
>> > certainly plausible at least. When I have a control that I know has to
>> > behave a certain way, I like to latch onto ARIA attributes so that I can
>> be
>> > reasonably certain that if the control looks to be working for sighted
>> > users, it is probably working for screen readers.
>> >
>> > You can actually see things like this in the W3C ARIA examples. For
>> > instance, a disclosure menu widget's JS is set up to "attach" itself to
>> any
>> > button with aria-expanded and aria-controls attributes:
>> >
>> https://www.w3.org/WAI/content-assets/wai-aria-practices/patterns/disclosure/examples/js/disclosureMenu.js
>> >
>> >