Bug 202212 – AX: ARIA spelling and grammar errors should be reported by VoiceOver

• Status: NEW
• Component: Accessibility

[Aaron Leventhal]

Created attachment 379560 [details]
Test file

Steps:
1. Load attached minimal test file with VoiceOver in Safari
2. Navigate each contenteditable by word 

Expected:
In the first line, "checker" should be reported as incorrectly spelled.
In the second line, "mine" should be reported as a grammar error.

Importance: the use case here is for apps such as Google Docs, Gmail, etc. that use spellcheck="false" and report their own spelling and grammar errors.

Tech notes: using UIElementInspector, it appears that AXInvalid is not being exposed on the <span> elements. However, AXInvalid does seem to be exposed on form control elements. Note that aria-invalid is a global ARIA attribute that can apply to any element. The "spelling" and "grammar" values are especially useful for rich text editing scenarios like this.

[Radar WebKit Bug Importer]

<rdar://problem/55710759>

[Aaron Leventhal]

Aside: I work on the Chrome team and want to implement this correctly. It's not clear that AXInvalid is the correct approach, because there is NSAccessibilityMarkedMisspelledTextAttribute. There is no known grammar equivalent, e.g. NSAccessibilityMarkedGrammarErrorTextAttribute

Also, in order for aria-invalid="spelling" to be useful, we also need a fix for https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=202213

[James Craig]

aria-invalid was deprecated on span (generic role) in ARIA 1.2, but I think the test case would be valid if role="group" or similar were added.

[Aaron Leventhal]

Hmm I would hav objected if I had noticed that, because this is how a lot of products indicate spelling and grammar errors today. Why did we do that for the grammar/spelling case?

Maybe aria-invalid=spelling|grammar should have a minimum role of "mark"?