Should the button to open the dialog have aria-haspopup="dialog"

[DavidMacDonald]

https://www.w3.org/TR/wai-aria-1.2/#aria-haspopup

https://www.w3.org/TR/wai-aria-practices-1.1/examples/dialog-modal/dialog.html

[sinabahram]

Technically ,maybe, but practically speaking, 100% not. This reads terribly in screen readers, announcing menu semantics which are completely nonsensical. In Jaws, it forces forms mode and it announces the button as a menu. In NVDA, it doesn't force insert mode, but instead it announces both menu and submenu semantics. It's 100% useless, full stop. I advise any /all developers never to use aria-haspopup="dialog". I have no clue why this is implemented so badly by screen readers.

[JAWS-test]

In my opinion, the wrong output of aria-haspopup for buttons is not a problem of screenreaders, but of the specification that dictates this wrong output: w3c/core-aam#51

One solution would be to use a link (with aria-haspopup=dialog) to open the dialog instead of a button.

However, there are already issues for the screen readers, e.g. FreedomScientific/standards-support#82, FreedomScientific/standards-support#32, nvaccess/nvda#7836, nvaccess/nvda#9096

For a discussion of the problems with aria-haspopup=dialog see w3c/aria#1024 (comment)

[sinabahram]

Maybe so. I simply hope it gets fixed, as aria-haspopup=”dialog” is completely useless in all situations, as it never adds any additional information over aria-haspopup=”true”, and it most definitely adds incorrect information in the assistive technology used by more than 80% or more of screen reader users around the world. I haven’t tested it with VO or Talkback, recently.

[Adriani90]

Actually aria haspopup="dialog" is very useful, especially when you work together with sighted people. at least I know that something will be opened which takes part of the screen surface. In case of non modal dialogs, the focus is not redirected to the dialogs, so at least the haspopup="dialog" gives me as a screen reader user the idea of what happens on the screen.

Note that NVDA can now report this properly, you can test with the last alpha in NVDA which can be downloaded here:
https://www.nvaccess.org/files/nvda/snapshots/

So from my perspective as a blind user, it totally makes sense to set this property on what ever element that opens a dialog.