1592200 - HTML - Combo Boxes: Change Behaviour of Jump Menus so that Focus isn't Automatically Moved to assist Screen Reader Users

Status: UNCONFIRMED

(Core :: DOM: Core & HTML, enhancement)

Description

[elliottabarnes]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; Win64; x64; rv:70.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/70.0

Steps to reproduce:

My immediate assumption is that nothing can be done about this due to the HTML spec, but I thought it may be worth asking in either case - if for nothing else other than to get your thoughts/ideas.

I'm a screen reader user, and use NVDA in conjunction with Firefox. One of the most annoying elements that I occasionally encounter on the web are HTML combo boxes that automatically change focus when the selection moves - I've pasted an example piece of code below to demonstrate the type of element that I'm referring to:

<select name="menu1" onchange="MM_jumpMenu('parent',this,0)">

I'm not sure how this type of element is navigated by non-screen reader users, but as a screen reader user placing focus on this element and then using the down arrow immediately results in the next item in the menu being loaded automatically, meaning that it's not possible to browse the choices in this menu by using the above method - the only way is by placing focus on the menu, and then using the Alt + down arrow combo to open the menu; each choice can then be focused, and when enter is pressed the selected item is activated, and in the above code example the corresponding page is loaded - however, I'm not sure if the above keyboard combo is widely known about (I purely came across it by accident).

Is there any way that we could change how these elements are treated by Firefox, so that menu choices are not loaded automatically when focused to assist screen reader users? As mentioned previously, I totally understand if this can't be done due to the HTML spec.

Thanks for your time.

Actual results:

See above

Expected results:

See above

Comment 1

[BugBot [:suhaib / :marco/ :calixte]]

Bugbug thinks this bug should belong to this component, but please revert this change in case of error.