E-mail List Archives

You are here: Home > Community > E-mail List Archives > View Thread

Thread: IE 11 Buggy ARIA behavior

Number of posts in this thread: 3 (In chronological order)

From: Moore,Michael (Accessibility) (HHSC)
Date: Thu, Aug 11 2016 12:47PM
Subject: IE 11 Buggy ARIA behavior
No previous message | Next message →

Good afternoon accessibility gods,

I am trying to track down and resolve what to me appears to be a bug in IE11.

We are building an application that is using aria-labelledby and aria-describedby to convey input labels and error messages or additional instructions to the user and are experiencing problems when we use multiple ids in the aria-labelledby attribute and when we use aria-describedby. The problem is confined to internet explorer. To confound things even further. Our IT department has conveniently reconfigured IE 11 on all of our systems and will not share what they have done for "security" purposes.

To track down the bug I created this code for a test page.

<!doctype html>
<html lang="en">
<head>
<meta charset="utf-8">
<title>Labelledby Describedby Bug</title>
</head>

<body>
<form method="post" action="">
<p id="para">This is my page</p>

<label id="pre">pre</label>

<select id="test" aria-labelledby="para pre" aria-describedby="post">
<option>male</option>
<option>female</option>
</select>

<label id="post">post</label>
</form>

</body>
</html>

My test results:

NVDA - FF Correct
NVDA - IE Reads second aria-labelledby element and the describedby element
JAWS 16 FF Correct
JAWS 16 IE - Reads both labelledby elements but does not read the describedby
JAWS 17 FF - Correct
JAWS 17 IE - Correct

I also checked the output of Aviewer - MSAA
IE accName=Pre accDescription none accRole Text
FF accName=This is my page pre accDescription=post accRole=combo box

I thought that it was very interesting that the role in IE seems to be incorrect. Also even though there is no accDescription in IE NVDA grabs it anyway.

If it is not too much trouble can someone validate my results for me to eliminate our environment as the cause of the issue? Or if you notice that there is a problem with my test markup let me know what I did wrong.

Thank you,

Mike Moore
Accessibility Coordinator

From: Birkir R. Gunnarsson
Date: Thu, Aug 11 2016 1:34PM
Subject: Re: IE 11 Buggy ARIA behavior
← Previous message | Next message →

First, I am going to be a little pedantic, only because I so often
construct tests that make sense at the time, then I forget what the
heck I was doing.
I added a little commentary and made the labels more descriptive (see
code below).
Jaws 17 with IE, aria-labelledby reads fine, aria-describedby does not
read at all.
Jaws 17 with FF: bothread fine except when I set user verbosity to
"dvanced" then Jaws stops reading aria-describedby (this is a
"feature" which is more of a bug).
I can test this better later on tonight or tomorrow.

----the code----
<!doctype html>
<html lang="en">
<head>
<meta charset="utf-8">
<title>Labelledby Describedby Bug</title>
</head>
<body>
<h1>The problem</h1>
<p>Jaws does not consistently announce multiple aria-labelledby
targets in IE11, nor does it anounce the target of
aria-describedby.</p>
<h2>The test setup.</h2>
<p>We put the aria-labelledby and aria-describedby references on a
combobox (select) element:</p>
<ul>
<li>There are two aria-labelledby target elements. The first contains
the text "what is your". The second contains the word "gender?".</li>
<li>There is one aria-describedby element, it contains the text
"imagine this is an error message".</li>
</ul>
<p>The screen reader should read "what is your gender? combobox,
imagine this is an error message.</p>
<form method="post" action="">
<p id="para">What is your </p>
<label id="pre">gender?</label>
<select id="test" aria-labelledby="para pre" aria-describedby="post">
<option>male</option>
<option>female</option>
</select>

<span id="post">Imagine this is an error message.</span>
</form>
</body>

On 8/11/16, Moore,Michael (Accessibility) (HHSC)
< = EMAIL ADDRESS REMOVED = > wrote:
> Good afternoon accessibility gods,
>
> I am trying to track down and resolve what to me appears to be a bug in
> IE11.
>
> We are building an application that is using aria-labelledby and
> aria-describedby to convey input labels and error messages or additional
> instructions to the user and are experiencing problems when we use multiple
> ids in the aria-labelledby attribute and when we use aria-describedby. The
> problem is confined to internet explorer. To confound things even further.
> Our IT department has conveniently reconfigured IE 11 on all of our systems
> and will not share what they have done for "security" purposes.
>
> To track down the bug I created this code for a test page.
>
> <!doctype html>
> <html lang="en">
> <head>
> <meta charset="utf-8">
> <title>Labelledby Describedby Bug</title>
> </head>
>
> <body>
> <form method="post" action="">
> <p id="para">This is my page</p>
>
> <label id="pre">pre</label>
>
>
> <select id="test" aria-labelledby="para pre" aria-describedby="post">
> <option>male</option>
> <option>female</option>
> </select>
>
> <label id="post">post</label>
> </form>
>
> </body>
> </html>
>
> My test results:
>
> NVDA - FF Correct
> NVDA - IE Reads second aria-labelledby element and the describedby element
> JAWS 16 FF Correct
> JAWS 16 IE - Reads both labelledby elements but does not read the
> describedby
> JAWS 17 FF - Correct
> JAWS 17 IE - Correct
>
>
> I also checked the output of Aviewer - MSAA
> IE accName=Pre accDescription none accRole Text
> FF accName=This is my page pre accDescription=post accRole=combo box
>
>
> I thought that it was very interesting that the role in IE seems to be
> incorrect. Also even though there is no accDescription in IE NVDA grabs it
> anyway.
>
> If it is not too much trouble can someone validate my results for me to
> eliminate our environment as the cause of the issue? Or if you notice that
> there is a problem with my test markup let me know what I did wrong.
>
> Thank you,
>
> Mike Moore
> Accessibility Coordinator
> > > > >

--
Work hard. Have fun. Make history.

From: Cousins, Earl
Date: Fri, Aug 12 2016 9:56AM
Subject: Re: IE 11 Buggy ARIA behavior
← Previous message | No next message

Mike,

I seem to remember running into this when we upgraded from IE8/JAWS14 to IE11/JAWS16.

Concatenation of ARIA labels was broken by one or the other (it seems like IE from your experience).

This may help with a workaround, but sadly hasn't been updated recently:
https://www.w3.org/WAI/GL/wiki/Using_aria-labelledby_to_concatenate_a_label_from_several_text_nodes

Earl Cousins | Web Accessibility Specialist