ComboBox: a11y attribute of editable not conveyed to ATs

[ptbrunet]

Dojo combo boxes are editable and this information is not being conveyed to Assitive Technology. AT sense this from the DOM structure, i.e. the object that gets focus has wairole:textfield with a parent of wairole:combobox. Dojo combo boxes do not have this structure.

There is a good implementation of an editable combo at ​http://www.mozilla.org/access/dhtml/combo which works well with FF2/JAWS9/JAWS10 and FF3/JAWS10. It looks like:

div - wairole:combobox
  input - wairole:textfield
  label
  button
  div - wairole:list
    div - wairole:listitem
    div - wairole:listitem

An example of the dojo edit combo is at ​http://archive.dojotoolkit.org/nightly/dojotoolkit/dijit/tests/form/test_ComboBox.html which is implemented as

table - wairole:presentation
  tbody
    tr
      td
        input - wairole:combobox

Hopefully, the fix is just to move the wairole:combobox up one level and add wairole:textfield to the input.

[bill]

Sounds good. I hope you don't need to have the wairole:list as a child of wairole:combobox, because that would be a big change (and would have problems w.r.t. the list getting hidden sometimes (which is why we make it a child of document.body).

[ptbrunet]

Bill, To get correct AT behavior I suspect that's what has to happen, i.e. role list below role combobox (role textfield and list as siblings). I've made similar comments in #4537.

[ptbrunet]

I noticed that the FF address bar doesn't have an object of role list below the object of role combobox. When its list is activated focus is on a listitem and focus is fired every time the arrow is used to move the selector. The browser tells the AT the n of m info, e.g. item 2 of 12. This is done through the a11y API, e.g. MSAA and possibly also IAccessible2.

[Becky Gibson]

updated implementation based on no longer using tables

[Becky Gibson]

updated to use setAttribute rather than setDisabled

[Becky Gibson]

(In [11973]) fixes #4710 updates so combobox and filteringselect are announced as editable combobox by screen reader. Have to find label assoc. with widget and also associate with the element with combobox role.

[Becky Gibson]

(In [12028]) refs #4710 - update role of edit field to textbox (rather than incorrect textfield)