Regarding multiselect combobox

Hi,

Since this was a recent APG topic and I had to do some research on this, I
figured I would share my findings here in case it's helpful.

 

I believe last time this was discussed, it was proposed that aria-checked be
used to represent multiple options that could be toggled.

 

I tried doing this, and discovered that aria-checked is still not a
supported state using Voiceover on iOS to convey the checked state of
checkable listbox options. You can try this out with a simple example here:

https://whatsock.com/Templates/Listboxes/Checkable/index.htm

I believe I filed a bug against this years ago, but I can't recall now.

 

This directly impacts the usage of the checkable state within a multiselect
combobox though, which appears to only be supported across platforms when
aria-selected is used to convey the selected state of each option. You can
try this out here to hear the contrast.

https://whatsock.com/Templates/Comboboxes/Native%20Inputs,%20Multiselect%20E
ditable%20with%20Substring%20Match/index.htm

 

This last one works across both desktop and mobile, though I don't have a
Mac to try this out with VO on that OS. I suspect it will still fail there
due to the now ancient bug regarding a lack of aria-activedescendant support
on that platform, but hope springs eternal I guess.

 

Hopefully this research helps a bit.

 

All the best,

Bryan