RE: ARIA AT Video Demo

Thanks for all the work on thinking through this. I unfortunately do see issues with this approach to answer your question. Thank you for asking it.

 

1. I do  not feel this conveys the difficulties I, James, and others face as screen reader users. It’s my understanding that a pretty long voice conversation has already occurred where James enumerated concerns.
2. I don’t think this represents a real world use case in terms of UI component usage. This feels way more like radio button territory and not a listbox/combobox implementation. Even if it is, it’s barely a toy example and it feels quite contrived to me, which hurts our chances of being heard and taken seriously IMHO. I think the example needs to match both the reality and criticality of the real world experiences we want to prevent.
3. I don’t believe this conveys the import of the matter at hand. Something far more critical like voting, a COVID test, question on an exam, a legal question with real world implications, and a myriad other examples all immediately come to mind as having far more weight. This isn’t just an opinion, both James and I are speaking from decades of lived experience being frustrated by web interfaces, and I just want to reiterate that I think lots of specifics have already been conveyed via a voice channel so I’m not repeating them here in the interests of time, but happy to discuss alternate approaches.
4. I don’t believe this will resonate as much with the general public, or let’s say the general web designer/developer/denizen public like so many other examples would, especially those in which we can make someone experience the actual pain of a long list being enumerated or tabs not working to switch to a critical screen to pay your taxes or expandable controls not working to convey life-saving information about how to take care of your child from the CDC or similar websites, etc.

 

I hope that helps contextualize some of my concerns.

 

Thanks again for all the work on this.

 

Take care,

Sina

 

President, Prime Access Consulting, Inc.

Phone: 919-345-3832

https://www.PAC.bz

Twitter: @SinaBahram

Personal Website:  <https://www.sinabahram.com> https://www.sinabahram.com

 

From: Boaz Sender <boaz@bocoup.com> 
Sent: Wednesday, February 2, 2022 12:49 PM
To: James Scholes <james@pac.bz>
Cc: Sina Bahram <sina@sinabahram.com>; public-aria-at@w3.org
Subject: Re: ARIA AT Video Demo

 

That's right this is the select-only-combo box. I also originally thought a long list would make more sense because I thought there was a type ahead box, but this is the one that only has select options.

 

Based on this thread, we're going to go forward with the select-only-combox with 3-4 items in it in the context of a doctors office.

 

Please let me know if you see any issue with that.

 

Thanks!

--

Boaz Sender

He / Him

UTC-8

My normal emailing hours might not be yours. Don't feel obligated to respond if you receive this at an odd time.

 

 

On Mon, Jan 31, 2022 at 7:08 PM James Scholes <james@pac.bz <mailto:james@pac.bz> > wrote:

Note that we're discussing select-only comboboxes for this demo, which don't work on macOS Safari plus VO.  E.g.:
https://w3c.github.io/aria-practices/examples/combobox/combobox-select-only.html

In other words, the ARIA version of a native HTML select.

Regards,

James Scholes
Director of Digital Accessibility, Prime Access Consulting, Inc.

On 31/01/2022 at 8:33 pm, Sina Bahram wrote:
> IMHO, as described, this is a listbox, not a combobox as it does not provide any editing. Also, for a list of three items, it may not convey the reasons for the criticality of such a component being done correctly. A list of states would at least provide a large enough list where things like first letter navigation, type ahead, and so forth are critical e.g. I just type ‘N’ followed by ‘O’ to land on North Carolina in such lists instead of arrowing dozens of times. When they are broken, I can’t do that, so it quite literally takes orders of magnitude more time to complete that micro-task.
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> Important to note that I’m still describing a listbox above. For it to be a combobox, we would want editing to occur within the field along with iteration e.g. the address bar in your browser is a combobox, as are search fields with autocomplete, and so forth.
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