Bug 257273 – AX: Voiceover on Safari ariadescendant not cooperating with UP and DOWN arrow keys

• Status: RESOLVED
• Resolution: DUPLICATE
• Component: Accessibility

[J.R.]

Hello,

I am writing to inquire about an a11y issue revolving around Voiceover with Safari. While creating a custom html search box, Voiceover on Safari does not read the activedescendant property of it's sibling while navigating with arrow keys. It should be noted that Voiceover behaves as expected using both Chrome and Firefox.

The code structure:

<input
  aria-activedescendant="the_option_id"
  aria-owns="the_figure_id"
  aria-controls="the_figure_id" <-- Neither owns nor control work on Safari, only one should be used.
  role="combobox"
/>

<figure id="the_figure_id">
 <figcaption>The list title</figcaption> 
    <ol>
       <li role="option" aria-selected="true" id="the_option_id" aria-label="The Aria Label">
            The List Option
        </li> 
    </ol>
 </figure>

With custom javascript to watch for the user's up arrow and down arrow to change the active-descendant id as well as the aria-selected attribute.

Expected behavior (and the behavior found in Chrome/Firefox with VoiceOver/Orca/TalkBack/JAWS):
If aria-selected, and if an activedescendant of aria-owns (or aria-controls), then VoiceOver should be reading aloud "The Aria Label". Details here: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Accessibility/ARIA/Attributes/aria-activedescendant

Actual Behavior:
Voiceover on Safari only instead reads "Start/End of Input", ignoring the aria attributes assigned.

Considering that Voiceover cooperates on Chrome and Firefox, I am going to assume that this is a Safari bug. Is there any place for me to file a bug against Safari that will be addressed? 

Historically there have been multiple bugs filed against this, all pointing to Safari not behaving properly:

1) 2021 - https://github.com/tailwindlabs/headlessui/issues/947
2) 2019 - https://github.com/nolanlawson/pinafore/issues/1629
3) 2017 - https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=167680
4) 2016 - https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=161734

[Radar WebKit Bug Importer]

<rdar://problem/109788054>

[Andres Gonzalez]

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 272565 ***

[Andres Gonzalez]

To verify the fix an upcoming version of VoiceOver is needed. I will add a comment here once it is available.