using NVDA ARIA describedby can only reference 1 value with IE 11

[nvaccessAuto]

Reported by SBleeks on 2015-08-07 18:41
Issue: aria-describedby values are not referenced when focus is placed on select elements in the Internet Explorer 11 web browser. This issue occurs while using either JAWS16 or NVDA2014 screen readers with IE11. If there is only one aria-describedby value being referenced from the select element, then NVDA2014 will read the value. See the following examples:

Example 1: aria-describedby, 1 reference

Province: Select Alberta British Columbia Manitoba

<h3>Should be referenced by aria-describedby</h3>
<div id="provRef">reference</div>

Example 2: aria-describedby, 2 references

Province: Select Alberta British Columbia Manitoba

<h3>Should be referenced by aria-describedby</h3>
<div>
<span id="provRef3">reference1</span>
<br /><span id="provRef4">reference2</span>
</div>

[nvaccessAuto]

Comment 1 by jteh on 2015-08-09 22:34
IE doesn't bother to expose aria-describedby at all via accessibility APIs (surprise surprise), so we have our own code to retrieve this. It seems that code doesn't handle multiple ids. We could fix this, but note that each additional id will yield a slight performance hit, since we have to fetch an additional element.

[deepan1981]

Still This issue is persist in IE and working fine in Firefox. Any update on this issue.

[Adriani90]

@deepan1981, @jcsteh I am probably wrong, but from an user perspective I do not see a difference between IE11 and Firefox 64.0.2 when testing the both examples with NVDA 2018.4.1. But I think I don't really understand this issue. :-) Are you having this issue with NVDA 2018.4.1?

[Adriani90]

Given support for IE ended in 2022 and the browser is being automatically removed from machines that still have it with an Edge update in February 2023, I am closing this as abandoned. Please comment if you have this issue in other browsers as well and we can reopen.