Bug 269026 – AX: Voiceover on the Mac does not properly support aria-activedescendant

• Status: RESOLVED
• Resolution: FIXED
• Component: Accessibility

[Bryan Garaventa]

Voiceover on the Mac does not properly support aria-activedescendant to ensure accessibility for the blind.

This is related to the prior bug: https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=167671 Which was said to be resolved, however it is not.

Steps to reproduce:
1. Visit: https://www.w3.org/WAI/ARIA/apg/patterns/combobox/examples/combobox-select-only/
2. Attempt to read the available options using the up/down arrow keys with Voiceover running.
3. Confirm that nothing is announced to convey the currently active option.

This is a critical stopper for blind Voiceover users, not just for the Combobox design pattern, but for all implementations that use aria-activedescendant to convey selection.

[Radar WebKit Bug Importer]

<rdar://problem/122590052>

We encountered this today - aria-activedescendent is broken. Tested on MacOS 14.5.

These examples do not work with Safari: https://www.w3.org/WAI/ARIA/apg/patterns/combobox/examples/grid-combo/ and https://www.w3.org/WAI/ARIA/apg/patterns/combobox/examples/combobox-autocomplete-list/

[Andres Gonzalez]

This problem is addressed in MacOs Sequoia 15. Please re-test with a recent build of MacOS 15.

[James Craig]

Of note, macOS 15 Sequoia is in beta release, so you can preview this fix by downloading and installing the beta at developer.apple.com

[Adrian Roselli]

Thanks to a kind soul (Roberto Perez) on Mastodon, it appears this is fixed:
https://tweesecake.social/@rperez030/113058633044394970

(I am not in a position to run a beta OS on my Mac.)