RE: search with autocomplete

Hi,
There is an example of this available at:
http://whatsock.com/Templates/Comboboxes/Native%20Inputs,%20Editable%20with%20Substring%20Match/


Typically the first suggested item is announced using a live region, via aria-live=”polite” on an element dedicated for this purpose.

Unfortunately screen reader support for this is still not as great or reliable as it should be after all these years however, so it’s important to keep this in mind. E.G. The above page mostly reads the first suggested item when using the latest version of JAWS with the latest versions of Chrome and Firefox, but not always as you would expect, which is annoying because there is nothing a web developer can do to fix that.

All the best,
Bryan


Bryan Garaventa
Principal Accessibility Architect
Level Access, Inc.
Bryan.Garaventa@LevelAccess.com<mailto:Bryan.Garaventa@LevelAccess.com>
415.624.2709 (o)
www.LevelAccess.com<http://www.levelaccess.com/>

From: Peter Weil <peter.weil@wisc.edu>
Sent: Wednesday, June 16, 2021 1:53 PM
To: kelly@kellford.com; rasmussen.bryan@gmail.com
Cc: w3c-wai-ig@w3.org
Subject: Re: search with autocomplete

CAUTION: This email originated from outside of the organization. Do not click links or open attachments unless you recognize the sender and know the content is safe.

Kelly,

This is really good information for developers. What do you mean by the “default result”? The first item that comes up when you enter a character?

Off the top of my head, there ought to be a way to both announce the default and somehow delay the total results announcement using either a promise or a timeout.

Peter

--
Peter Weil, Web Developer
University Marketing
University of Wisconsin–Madison
peter.weil@wisc.edu<mailto:peter.weil@wisc.edu>
(m) 608-220-3089

On Jun 16, 2021, 3:34 PM -0500, rasmussen.bryan@gmail.com<mailto:rasmussen.bryan@gmail.com> <rasmussen.bryan@gmail.com<mailto:rasmussen.bryan@gmail.com>>, wrote:

Do you or anyone else know how to implement an example of this - hear
the default result after you enter a character?

Thanks,
Bryan Rasmussen

On Wed, Jun 16, 2021 at 10:28 PM <kelly@kellford.com<mailto:kelly@kellford.com>> wrote:


I too use these frequently and find them of immense value and am a screen reading user. The times I don't are more about the experience of an individual example the concept. For example, for me personally, being informed how many results after each character I type can be quite disruptive. What is better is to hear the default result after you enter a character. Communication of the total results should happen only after this in my view.

Kelly



-----Original Message-----
From: Léonie Watson <lwatson@tetralogical.com<mailto:lwatson@tetralogical.com>>
Sent: Wednesday, June 16, 2021 3:13 PM
To: bryan rasmussen <rasmussen.bryan@gmail.com<mailto:rasmussen.bryan@gmail.com>>; w3c-wai-ig@w3.org<mailto:w3c-wai-ig@w3.org>
Subject: Re: search with autocomplete

I use them on a regular basis, and find them useful for exactly the same reasons a sighted person might - they help me find something when I don't have complete information, and/or they help me enter the thing I'm intrested in more quickly than typing might permit.



On 16/06/2021 20:50, bryan rasmussen wrote:

I was recently thinking about to make a search with autocomplete
solution work in relation to a screenreader and in the middle of doing
so I developed the rather jarring idea that I could think of no way in
which such a thing could ever be useful to a blind user of a
screenreader (although perhaps useful for a sighted user)

In my experience autocomplete works for me because while typing I can
with a bit of pattern recognition see that what I am looking for is
suddenly in the first few results and immediately select what I want.

Are there any studies of autocomplete solutions for blind users where
they actually say this was useful for us? Is there any blind user on
the list here who can say they have used an autocomplete solution that
helped them? If so, what were the best parts of that solution?

Thanks,
Bryan Rasmussen

--
Director @TetraLogical
https://tetralogical.com/