RE: accessible autocomplete

There is an example of such a feature at https://nationalcareers.service.gov.uk/. A couple of weeks ago we did some user testing with disabled people and a variety of assistive technologies including screen readers on desktop and mobile devices, a screen magnifier and Dragon voice recognition software. The search-as-you-type feature performed very well for all of them.

Unfortunately, I can’t tell you how it is built – we only do the testing. But the UK government is keen to share good practices and have stated on many occasions that anyone is welcome to use their code, even for commercial purposes.

It is worth noting that many UK government websites contain features that look the same and work the same for “normal” users, but they are coded differently and some don’t work at all with assistive technologies. This one is the best implementation I have seen and it does not have any obvious flaws or drawbacks.

Steve Green
Managing Director
Test Partners Ltd



From: Michellanne Li <michellanne.li@gmail.com>
Sent: 20 March 2019 02:14
To: WAI IG <w3c-wai-ig@w3.org>
Subject: accessible autocomplete

Hello all,

I'm wondering if anyone has a preferred method or plugin for creating accessible form input fields with autocomplete. To be clear, I understand that you can simply use the autocomplete attribute, but I'd like to take it a step further and provide a list of suggestions, like this demo from W3 Schools on How to Create Autocomplete<https://www.w3schools.com/howto/howto_js_autocomplete.asp>.

I've used chosen.js<https://harvesthq.github.io/chosen/> in the past, but my research indicates that it still has usability issues with AT.

Thanks so much!

Michellanne Li
(512) 718-2207
http://www.michellanne.com