RE: improved select boxes - still accessible

Hi Marc,

A quick look at these in Chrome's DOM inspector shows that neither are using ARIA attributes at all, so can't be considered accessible from a screenreader point of view.

Both seem to build some of their custom combos from A elements (and also assorted SPAN and LI elements); but since there's no ARIA roles (or any of the other attributes that would be required to build an accesible select equivalent), NVDA reads them out as links.

At a first glance, keyboard support in both cases is reasonably good; keyboard seems to work as expected, esc dismisses the drop-downs as expected; this is one bright spot - it used to be the case that custom HTML controls didn't even get that right and were essentially mouse-only!

But for now, they can't be considered screenreader accessible in their current form due to the lack of ARIA support. If the authors added the appropriate support, however, then they could be made accessible ( - at least assuming that a user is using a suitably current browser and screenreader combination).

--

Marc, I now have a question for you: I'm curious as to why you asked on this list about if these are accessible, instead of testing them out for yourself. Perhaps you don't have access to JAWS? If that's the case, then for web pages at least, the free NVDA screenreader has pretty much the same capabilities, so makes for a good alternative to test or experiment with. Or are you just not yet familiar with how to evaluate a control for accessibility? I'm wondering what are the resources a web content author would need to have in order to be able to make this determination themselves.

Cheers,

Brendan.

--
Brendan McKeon | brendan_mckeon@hotmail.com


-----Original Message-----
From: Marc Haunschild [mailto:mh@zadi.de] 
Sent: Thursday, August 16, 2012 12:45 AM
To: w3c-wai-ig@w3.org
Subject: Fwd: SV: improved select boxes - still accessible


Of course you guys are right. Here are the missing links

http://ivaynberg.github.com/select2/
http://harvesthq.github.com/chosen/

So sorry!

----- Ursprüngliche Mail -----
Von: "Morten Tollefsen" <morten@medialt.no>
An: "Marc Haunschild" <mh@zadi.de>
Gesendet: Donnerstag, 16. August 2012 08:44:10
Betreff: SV: improved select boxes - still accessible

Hi!

Perhaps you forgot a link in the message below?

- Morten

-----Opprinnelig melding-----
Fra: Marc Haunschild [mailto:mh@zadi.de] 
Sendt: 16. august 2012 08:01
Til: w3c-wai-ig@w3.org
Emne: improved select boxes - still accessible

Hi everyone,

I found two really interesting javaScript upgrades for select boxes. I want to use them, but I wonder if they are accessible in jaws and other screenreader software.

Also I would like to get some general feedback. Is it confusing to interact with these modified boxes? Or do you think the improvements are helpful?

I am grateful for any response!

Thanks for your help!

Marc

Received on Thursday, 16 August 2012 08:21:01 UTC