autocomplete.js and tooltip.js are missing aria-atomic=true

[russelleck]

An error container class="ui-helper-hidden-accessible" is made with aria-live="assertive", but it does not contain a WAI-ARIA attribute that will make sure all assistive technologies can read the error message after more than one invalid submission.

Adding the aria-atomic="true" to the error container tag will ensure assistive technologies can read the message after more than one invalid submission.

wp-includes/js/jquery/ui/autocomplete.js - line 313
wp-includes/js/jquery/ui/tooltip.js - line 109

[afercia]

Worth noting these two files are part of jQuery UI, which is an external library. Any change to these files would be lost the next time jQuery UI gets updated in core. Change requests should be reported upstream.

That said, I'm not sure an aria-atomic attribute is the only change that should be made.

• tooltip.js: to my knowledge, it's not used in core.
• autocomplete.js: it uses a role="status". which has ​an implicit aria-atomic value of true. It also uses an aria-live="assertive" attribute which overrides the default polite value of the role="status". At this point, it would be better to make it a role="alert" and omit the other attributes.

Seems to me the current jQuery UI implementation shows a bit its age. Some years ago the alert and status roles weren't fully supported. At that time, it was pretty common to build aria-live regions by setting the (implicit) attributes explicitly. Today, support has improved and it would be better to use some more modern code. Anyways, this issue should be reported to the jQuery UI team consideration.

For reference, in trunk these two files are located at:

• https://core.trac.wordpress.org/browser/trunk/src/js/_enqueues/vendor/jquery/ui/autocomplete.js
• https://core.trac.wordpress.org/browser/trunk/src/js/_enqueues/vendor/jquery/ui/tooltip.js

[sabernhardt]

Thanks for creating a report!

I moved it to the jQuery UI repo ​issue #2088 so the discussion can continue there.