FormItem.setCanEdit should set/update aria-readonly

[hohwille]

Dear Isomorphic Team,

I have a suggestion to improve accessbility of SmartGWT/SmartClient:

Currently Screenreaders like JAWS or NVDA are reading FormItems that have "canEdit" set to false, as editable even though SmartGWT is setting readonly="TRUE" in the HTML.
I do not know why WAI-ARIA aware software does not automatically honor other HTML standards if no explicit ARIA attribute is present but it seems the way it is meant to be :(

Therefore IMHO FormItem.setCanEdit should set/update aria-readonly.

1. setCanEdit(false) should additionally set aria-readonly="true" in the DOM.

2. Further setCanEdit(true) should remove this attribute. However, this might be the tricky part on the long run as aria-readonly="true" might be set for other reasons. So maybe the attribute should only be removed if it has explicitly been set by setCanEdit(false) before. You maybe already have an internal state in your widgets to determine this or will know best if this matters at all or how to resolve this.

Maybe you can also just set aria-readonly to the same value as readonly.

FYI: This only applies if you call SC.setScreenReaderMode(true); because otherwise the role attribute is not set and therefore assistive technology honors the readonly attribute. So actually in this point the screenreader mode has a negative impact on what is read.

Thanks & regards
Jörg

[Isomorphic]

Thanks for the feedback. We have made the change to the development branch (SmartGWT 4.0d and SmartClient 9.0d), and it will show up in nightly builds going forward.

Please try a nightly build dated Jan 9 or greater and let us know if the property is not visible for you

Regards
Isomorphic Software