Bug 279214 – AX: VoiceOver does not echo deletions in a contenteditable region with programmatic value updates

• Status: NEW
• Component: Accessibility

[Sarah Higley]

Most web-based rich text editors use javascript to programmatically manage the text content of the contenteditable region, rather than relying on default browser insertion and deletion. A couple examples include the Facebook compose box, the twitter compose box, and the Lexical rich text editor (https://lexical.dev/).

On Safari, VoiceOver echos content insertion for these, but not deletion. On Chrome, VoiceOver reads both insertion and deletion. This appears to be a common enough experience that in several user studies on an rich text editor using Lexical, multiple VoiceOver users mentioned that they were familiar with the issue from elsewhere.

I created a simplified reproduction of several of the more common ways to handle text deletion with javascript in a contenteditable div:

- https://codepen.io/smhigley/pen/PordJoy?editors=1010
- (or use this link to access only the example UI without the Codepen editors): https://cdpn.io/pen/debug/PordJoy

VoiceOver currently does not echo deleted text for any of the three methods demonstrated in the Codepen when using Safari (tested on 17.6).

[Radar WebKit Bug Importer]

<rdar://problem/135360396>