mdAutocomplete not passing Accessibility Test

[ByzanTine]

There are two errors.
Elements with ARIA roles must ensure required owned elements are present.
This element has an unsupported ARIA attribute.
Run the Chrome Accessibility Tool inside Audit in Chrome Developer Tool will replay this issue.

[marcysutton]

For both errors:

• Remove role="listbox" from <md-autocomplete-wrap>, add role="combobox" to <input>, which already has aria-owns and other required ARIA attributes.
• Add role="listbox" to <ul class="md-autocomplete-suggestions">.
• On each virtual repeat list item, change role="button" to role="option".

[marcysutton]

Here is a combobox demo: http://oaa-accessibility.org/example/10/

[jelbourn]

@marcysutton @ByzanTine: does the autocomplete actually have an usability problems in our supported browser + screen reader combinations? The audit from the tool is useful, but it's possible everything is working fine as is, in which case I would put a lower priority on this.

[marcysutton]

In Voiceover and Safari, the field is announced as "search text field", but not listbox...so it's hard to tell that it's anything other than a plain text field. But I could see this kind of issue being a lower priority, since it is currently operable. In Chrome, it is announced as "edit text" with the label repeated twice, but I am not sure why. Otherwise it works okay.

In JAWS 16 and IE, we have a bigger problem: although the widget is announced correctly as a listbox, the options and screen reader messages are all announced literally as "left brace left brace message right brace right brace", so there something wrong with the interpolation. This makes the widget completely unusable. If someone can check it in JAWS 17, that would be good.

NVDA and Firefox seems to work okay, but I'd be curious to hear from a proficient screen reader user. On touch devices with a screen reader running, the autocomplete options are pretty unusable...but I suspect most autocompletes would suffer from the same problem.

In short: with the exception of JAWS incorrectly reading messages, any changes could come after actual user testing.