The Accessible Auto-suggest revisited

About this presentation

At Web Directions Respond in May 2017, I presented “The Anatomy of an Accessible Auto-suggest” which was a step-by-step guide on how to implement an accessible auto-suggest. In December that same year, the W3C made ARIA 1.1 a W3C Recommendation, and changed the requirements for the combobox pattern that formed the foundation of that auto-suggest component. The changes were made with the aim of more accurately representing the semantics of the user interface in the accessibility tree, and while they did solve that problem, unfortunately, they created many other issues. Fast forward 7 years to 2024, ARIA 1.2 is a W3C Recommendation, and the combobox pattern that runs our auto-suggest has gone back to the future. In this talk, we’ll look at changes in ARIA using the combobox pattern from ARIA 1.0 through to ARIA 1.2, and recreate our accessible auto-suggest component.