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Make aria-live optional #4447
Description
What do I want?
I want to make an accessible combobox.
What do I have in mind?
Make aria-live messages optional: they are not part of the spec for combobox accessibility, and I would like to remove it entirely.
Example of similar functionality
Accessible combobox is defined on w3.org: https://www.w3.org/TR/wai-aria-practices-1.1/examples/combobox/aria1.0pattern/combobox-autocomplete-both.html
No aria-live; just roles and attributes.
Activity
ebonow commentedon Feb 17, 2021
Greetings @bozdoz ,
Just a heads up that this functionality will likely be covered in #4414 though it is not yet explicitly documented (update: added this to the PR).
It's understood that there are collisions with some of the roles and attributes so making the
aria-liveattribute accessible via props to beassertive,polite, oroffshould suffice to meet the needs of more people.I think there are some larger discussions to be had about the expectations of screen reader compatibility across various attributes across different situations and implementations. Roles and attributes has been tried before and was not a sufficient solution at the time which is why aria-live was implemented, but that said, we want to shore up the existing aria-live compatibility as react-select is very much geared towards giving users better customization.
To my understanding, #1585 exists because the selected option/options does not exist in the input which is even more problematic when working with isMulti. @bozdoz are you aware of any native attributes/roles that fills this gap?
bozdoz commentedon Feb 23, 2021
@ebonow re #1585 I've also run into that problem, and I agree with your assessment: the value is rendered in a div, and not present in the focused input. I'm not sure how you get around that without faking it with aria-live messages. So maybe this issue of disabling aria-live is not worth working on.
ebonow commentedon Feb 23, 2021
@bozdoz it's certainly complicated. One other challenge has been dealing with isMulti as that is another use-case not handled well by default attributes and roles.
We discussed this as a group to see if it was worth implementing, and the ability to set the aria-live attribute to "assertive" or "off" might make sense for some implementations so we decided to add
aria-liveas a prop in the incoming PR.We truly want to provide a better experience when it comes to accessibility and I understand many see these shortcomings as a slight, so we are going to do a better job explaining by adding a section dedicated to accessibility and giving better tools to support an experience for all users.