Screen-readers not moving to error summary after first submission #67
Description
Initial report from DAC
When using JAWS and an error is thrown, an error summary is displayed, focus goes to the summary and the heading is announced as expected.
When continuing to tab, focus is logical, however, if the arrow keys are used, the user can be sent to any random area of the page.
Response from Daniel
I checked the Design System and they haven't implemented the auto focus javascript for the summary panel in their examples, so I couldn't recreate it there.
I have just looked at a service in staging and I can see it behaving similarly.
With limited testing on 1 service, I think it works ok the very first time the error summary is shown, but subsequent submissions seem to keep focus on the submit button so the arrows are taking you to the content around the button.
The same issue is present with NVDA as well, using Edge, Chrome and Firefox.
Seems ok with IE11 though, with using JAWS 2021.2111.2.
Response from DAC
Hi all I have just checked on the following service using just Chrome and JAWS Version 2021.2107.12 ILM and it appears to work as expected here
Response from Adam
On that live DVLA service I can see the issue described.
In particular on this page GOV.UK - Have you lived outside of the UK in the last 12 months? (apply-provisional-driving-licence.service.gov.uk) which asks a two stage question, I submitted the form without answer and arrow down moved me inside the error summary as expected.
Submitting again with no fields selected results in the cursor moving from the submit button to the footer when arrowing down - that is the cursor had remained on the submit button. This could be put down to JAWS using heuristics (which we know it does) and responding to a known identical page markup.
Then when I picked the first answer which adds an additional field (important to ensure a change in markup and rule out possible heuristics), then arrow down places me in the footer again - though sometimes it moves directly to the Terms and Conditions link. Interestingly you can see focus initially moving to the summary and if you are quick you can sometimes arrow down to the first item in the summary before the cursor is moved away to the footer.
However, if you refresh JAWS' virtual buffer when the page reloads after form submission then the observed behaviour disappears and the page behaves as expected, moving the cursor within the error summary each time.
This is observed using Chrome 95.0.4638.69 on JAWS 2021.2012.57, but the same issue can be seen with JAWS 2020.2008.24 and JAWS 2019.1912.1 and JAWS 18.0.5038.
There is an outstanding issue on Gov Frontend regarding a similar thing with NVDA
alphagov/govuk-frontend#2055
They feel like screen-reader bugs / features to me. If it didn't work on the first submission then we could look at what was going wrong and providing better support. So I don't think this is something I'd suggest adding to a statement.
Having said that I'm now curious as to whether removing the error summary etc when the user submits the page and then having it reappear on page load afresh would fix this (a defacto buffer refresh), though not something I think I'd want to recommend to services.