RE: Combobox and Freedom Scientific

Hi Rich,
I spoke with Matt about this last Thursday, and it seems a lot of the problem we've been having is that we are all talking about different things and this is confusing.

So when in the past on this thread everybody has kept going on about the necessity for a Combobox to be modal, that makes no sense. Comboboxes, like HTML select elements are not modal and should not be seen like this.

So it seems that what we are actually talking about is that a dialog, if spawned somehow by a keypress within a combobox and where focus is then moved into a role=dialog container, must then be modal until closed and focus is set back to the combobox.

At this point the user is interacting with a dialog, not a combobox, because they are within a totally different control type.

To me this explanation makes a lot more sense than saying that a combobox must be modal, because that totally opposes any native control type like this.

From: Rich Schwerdtfeger [mailto:richschwer@gmail.com]
Sent: Monday, April 11, 2016 12:52 PM
To: Matt King <mck@fb.com>
Cc: ARIA <public-aria@w3.org>
Subject: Combobox and Freedom Scientific

Matt,

I had a meeting with Glen Gordon and Brett Lewis at Freedom Scientific. Among other things we discussed, we discussed the use of dialog box in a combobox and the need for it to be modal. They did not agree with your statement from the last ARIA Working Group meeting:
https://www.w3.org/2016/04/07-aria-minutes.html

>From the minutes:

"rs: Freedom Scientific raised this issue: it needs to be a modal dialog box

mk: glenn backed away. let's talk about it later"
They feel the same way that I did that the Dialog box MUST be modal. The reason for this is because unlike the other controls a user is tabbing through the dialog box and magically they are outside the dialog box. They want the user to be able either complete the dialog box or use escape key to get the user back to the combobox control with the result of the selection. To quote Glenn, otherwise it would be a "horrible experience."

What Glen also did say and you agreed to was that there needed to be a way to get back to the dialog box (to the owner) which is the combobox.

This was my position and I am going to want the spec. to say that if the author is going to launch a dialog box from within the combobox (includes aria-owns) that it MUST be a modal dialog box.

I was not crazy about dialog boxes being launched from a combobox in the first place and I think this is an acceptable compromise and one that would help ensure usability.

Please correct your proposal for the combobox role to reflect this and ensure this guidance is provided for in the authoring practices.

Rich



Rich Schwerdtfeger