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Select accessiblity issues for JAWs and NVDA #2937
Description
Great job ya'll with the recent efforts to make react-select more accessible. It performs great in VoiceOver! Unfortunately the strategy doesn't seem to work for the two most commonly used SR's JAWs and NVDA.
For both, the live region alerts are not read aloud when you enter or select items in the list. This ends being mostly a silent black box for these SR's, and the input doesn't seem usable :/
I will admit i'm not the best SR user, so some of the issue may be me, but i am not a complete novice either. I'm also trying to com up with a good a11y strategy for these sorts of inputs for the next iteration of react-widgets!
Reacted by Jeffrey D Johnson and Aaron Vanderpoel
Activity
zebogen commentedon Dec 18, 2018
I believe the issue is that the current implementation doesn't exactly follow the spec. The MDN documentation for ARIA Live Regions says:
react-selectonly renders the Live Region when the dropdown is focused:react-select/src/Select.js
Lines 1750 to 1753 in 79efe79
So this should change to always render the live region but clear the content when the dropdown loses focus.
bladey commentedon May 28, 2020
Hello -
In an effort to sustain the
react-selectproject going forward, we're closing old issues.We understand this might be inconvenient but in the best interest of supporting the broader community we have to direct our efforts towards the current major version.
If you aren't using the latest version of
react-selectplease consider upgrading to see if it resolves any issues you're having.However, if you feel this issue is still relevant and you'd like us to review it - please leave a comment and we'll do our best to get back to you!
jquense commentedon May 28, 2020
Still relevant last I checked and important :)
Thanks!
bladey commentedon May 28, 2020
Thanks @jquense!
ebonow commentedon Mar 7, 2021
Greetings @jquense ,
Would you kindly verify if this this is still an issue for you in version 4.2.1?
I spent a bit of time refactoring the aria-live implementation and was sure to render the region on mount, but was not personally able to do any testing outside of VoiceOver.
https://github.com/JedWatson/react-select/blob/master/packages/react-select/src/components/LiveRegion.js#L163-L175
jquense commentedon Mar 8, 2021
@ebonow thanks for working on this, I unfortunately don't have time to verify this, but if you or anyone else wants to test with NVDA, Microsoft provides free VM's for testing stuff (like old internet explorer), In the past i've used them to test with NVDA from my Mac
ebonow commentedon Mar 8, 2021
@jquense I've been using virtual box but it seems laggy so I may have to reorganize some things to get the space for Bootcamp. There are two developers who have begun taking on accessibility testing that did verify the changes work on JAWS and NVDA, but wanted to verify with you in case you had a different experience.
I'll mark this as resolved especially since the linked PR which would have closed this was implemented in a similar way as #4414
jquense commentedon Mar 8, 2021
awesome thanks for all the hard work 👍
Watso196 commentedon Jul 2, 2025
Hey there! Curious if there are any plans to address the issue listed here? My team is still seeing this issue in the React Select and are wondering if this non-live region content should still be included with the update to role="combobox"?