RE: Safari lacks support for aria-activedescendent: questions

I don’t know of a workaround for this Safari issue, and I just tell clients not to use design patterns that rely on . aria-activedescendant.

When making recommendations for our clients, we usually go for a third option, which is to design the feature differently, such that all the functionality is retained, but there may be a minor reduction in usability. It’s not ideal, but I think it’s a better trade-off than having good usability for some people and no accessibility for others.

Waiting for browser and AT vendors to fix issues is a hopeless strategy because most don’t publish a roadmap at all, and those that do only publish it a few months ahead. There are countless bugs that should be easy to fix but have been present for years, so you can’t assume that easy bugs will be fixed soon.

Steve Green
Managing Director
Test Partners Ltd


From: Taliesin Smith <talilief@gmail.com>
Sent: Wednesday, August 28, 2024 8:39 PM
To: WAI Interest Group discussion list <w3c-wai-ig@w3.org>
Subject: Safari lacks support for aria-activedescendent: questions


Dear WAI ARIA-IG,


It seems that it is a well known issue that “Voiceover on the Mac does not properly support aria-activedescendant to ensure accessibility for the blind.” (Webkit bug list<https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=269026>).


This bug makes it so that the selected option is not always read out - mostly it is not read out, but there are times when it gets read out. The behavior is quite buggy. This bug affects the recommended Design Pattern documented on the ARIA Practices website for grid-combo<https://www.w3.org/WAI/ARIA/apg/patterns/combobox/examples/grid-combo/> and the auto-complete combo<https://www.w3.org/WAI/ARIA/apg/patterns/combobox/examples/combobox-autocomplete-list/>.


I have 2 questions:

  1.  Does anyone on this list know of a good work around for Safari?


My second question is more nuanced as our team tries to assess the inclusion of this Design Pattern on our website. Pros: the pattern offers important search functionality for long lists of options, including mid-string searches which are important for us. The pattern works when using the Chrome browser.



  1.  From a WCAG perspective, how do people generally address browser-based bugs that are out of their hands?

     *   Do you include the pattern in your website knowing that some people will need to change browsers to access certain aspects of your website, and wait for the vendor to address it? OR

     *   Do you design an alternative that offers less functionality for everyone?


I would appreciate thoughts on both questions 1 and 2. If question 2 is not appropriate for this list, I can re-post that question on the WCAG-IG list.


Taliesin
~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~
Taliesin L. Smith
talilief@gmail.com<mailto:talilief@gmail.com>
taliesin.smith@colorado.edu<mailto:taliesin.smith@colorado.edu>

Inclusive Design Research Specialist
PhET Interactive Simulations
http://phet.colorado.edu/

Department of Physics
University of Colorado, Boulder