RE: ACTION-1490 proposal says good bye to the "inline" notion for combobox

Joseph,

The proposal I am putting forward in action 1490 is to remove all that extra meaning from aria-autocomplete and give it one clear purpose that authors, AT developers, and users can utilize.

As a user, I will not remember all these different meanings. And, I do not want my screen reader to slow me down with a description of how the combobox is going to behave. 

The best way for me to find out what is in the list and how many values are in the list is to read the list. There are some complex interactions where it might be a good idea for the author to add a live region with a short description of what is happening in the list as the user types in the input. But, such cases are pretty rare.

If we restrict the meaning of autocomplete to describe what is happening in the input field, then the screen reader developer can exploit that to provide intelligible reading of the completed value and/or caret position in that value.

The screen reader developer can get info about the availability of the list from the combination of aria-controls and aria-expanded and inform the user appropriately.

One of my primary goals is to make ARIA easier for everyone to understand so we can increase the quality of both authoring and AT support. That is the spirit of my proposal.

Matt
-----Original Message-----
From: Joseph Scheuhammer [mailto:clown@alum.mit.edu] 
Sent: Monday, February 8, 2016 9:16 AM
To: Matt King <a11ythinker@gmail.com>; 'ARIA Working Group' <public-aria@w3.org>
Cc: 'Bryan Garaventa' <bryan.garaventa@ssbbartgroup.com>
Subject: Re: ACTION-1490 proposal says good bye to the "inline" notion for combobox

On 2016-02-08 3:28 AM, Matt King wrote:
>
> *Further, for combobox, aria-autocomplete would never be “none” or 
> “inline”. The “inline” value would be used in a textbox that provides 
> autocomplete but does not display a list.*
>

A combobox that has aria-autcomplete="none" means that it supports neither inline nor listbox suggested completions.  The listbox autocomplete scenario is where the list items are filtered to show only the items that match what the user has typed in the text entry field.  A listbox is displayed, but it doesn't show all of its items.

Suppose, for example, the listbox contains the names of all 50 U.S. 
states.  If the user types "A", then the list box shows only the states that begin with "A".  If they type "Al", then "Arizona", "Arakansas", etc. are removed from the display, further reducing the list of available choices.  If the user subsequently deletes the last character they typed, then the states that were removed reappear in the listbox.

If aria-autcomplete="none", then no filtering is applied to the listbox.  No matter what the user types, the listbox shows all 50 states.

--
;;;;joseph.

'Die Wahrheit ist Irgendwo da Draußen. Wieder.'
                  - C. Carter -

Received on Monday, 8 February 2016 17:53:10 UTC