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Re: Whether or not to disable form submit button

for

From: Mark Magennis
Date: Dec 14, 2023 9:03AM

A disabled Submit button can still be focusable and exposed to AT. Coding-wise, if you add the HTML disabled attribute it will not be focusable in most, if not all, browsers. But if you add aria-disabled="true" it will remain focusable. This makes it discoverable and gives you the opportunity to provide some information in the name or description about why it is currently disabled.
From: WebAIM-Forum < <EMAIL REMOVED> > on behalf of jp Jamous < <EMAIL REMOVED> >
Sent: Thursday 14 December 2023 14:00
To: WebAIM Discussion List < <EMAIL REMOVED> >
Subject: [EXTERNAL] Re: [WebAIM] Whether or not to disable form submit button

What Chat GPT provided is not necessarily WCAG compliant. In fact, it is a UX Design guideline. All of the UX designers I have worked with since 2018 have been implementing this.

While it might work for sighted users, I find it to work against screen reader and keyboard only users. If the form does not display any errors once a form element loses focus and no status alerts are spoken, then the user would tab to the end of the form and there is no Submit button receiving focus. That Throws the user off until the user figures out that something is wrong with the form.

I am not claiming that I am against it. As long as
1. there is a visual alert
And
2. status alert

Once the invalid form element loses focus , having the Submit button disabled is okay. Unfortunately, UX Design does not take all users in consideration. That is why my approach with UX Designers is to look at an inclusive approach rather than what is defined by UX Design documentation.

Just my 2 cents on this.