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

“Here "descendants" means either a DOM descendant of the container, or one referenced by aria-owns.  This procedure won't succeed for combobox containers if aria-controls is used instead of aria-owns.”

This is the part that is confusing me, because it already works, I’ve tested this in IE11, Firefox, Chrome using JAWS and NVDA and it works accessibly, and the same implementation is accessible in iOS using VoiceOver in Safari.

I get that in the browser you are referring to the mappings, but the web is a weird place, and there are many instances that involve relationships like this that are not necessarily good to represent as trapped modals or as requisite children.

E.G a search field that dynamically updates a region of the page as you type into it, that can announce the first result that is matched while also allowing you to use Up/Down to scroll through the results while leaving focus on the search field. The user will not want to be trapped and to be unable to read the rest of the page if they desire to.

This currently works accessibly using the method I’ve described here, but will be practically useless if trapped in the manner you are describing.

So if the implementation I’ve got here is incorrect, regardless that it is already provably accessible, what will changing it accomplish, and what specifically needs to be changed?

I also am having a hard time understanding the relationship of triggering a dialog from a combobox.

E.G If you are typing into a combobox, at what point would you be navigating a dialog? How could you read back what you have typed if focus is then trapped in a dialog?


From: Rich Schwerdtfeger [mailto:richschwer@gmail.com]
Sent: Thursday, February 11, 2016 1:03 PM
To: Joseph Scheuhammer <clown@alum.mit.edu>
Cc: Bryan Garaventa <bryan.garaventa@ssbbartgroup.com>; Matt King <mck@fb.com>; ARIA Working Group <public-aria@w3.org>
Subject: Re: ACTION-1490 proposal says good bye to the "inline" notion for combobox

using aria-activedescendant for aria-controls would be hugely bad. Think live regions where a checkbox controls the content of the live region.


Rich Schwerdtfeger



On Feb 11, 2016, at 2:10 PM, Joseph Scheuhammer <clown@alum.mit.edu<mailto:clown@alum.mit.edu>> wrote:

Hi Bryan,

On 2016-02-11 1:03 PM, Bryan Garaventa wrote:

The use of aria-controls in this case solves the issue by setting an explicit association, and aria-activedescendant works in identifying the referenced node that is active.

There may still be a problem -- I am investigating.  The Core-AAM describes an algorithm associated with aria-activedescendant that user agents MUST execute in order to mark the potential active descendants as focusable.  In summary, when the user agent encounters a container with an aria-activedescendant attribute, the user agent must visit all descendants of the container and determine if they could be the target of the container's aria-activedescendant.  The user agent must expose a focusable state for each such target, and only for those descendants that are targets.

Here "descendants" means either a DOM descendant of the container, or one referenced by aria-owns.  This procedure won't succeed for combobox containers if aria-controls is used instead of aria-owns.

A way to patch this is to run the exact same algorithm but base it on aria-controls if aria-owns is not used.  However, that requires buy-in from all user agents, and tests cases for the ARIA test harness.


I'm getting confused by the reference to modal dialogs. This isn't a modal dialog, it's a Listbox, and focus is never meant to leave the element that includes role=combobox. So what does the modal dialog have to do with it?

Matt's new definition of combobox includes drop-downs that contain a grid, a treegrid, or a dialog instead of a listbox.  When Rich discussed this with Freedom Scientific, they were willing to handle such cases, but only if the drop-down was modal.  The thread starts here:
https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-aria/2016Feb/0151.html


--
;;;;joseph.

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