Error messages should use aria-errormessage

[Tobias Bengfort]

#32819 added aria-describedby to associate help texts and errors with their inputs. I recently learned that there is also the more specialized ​aria-errormessage.

I am not sure if using aria-describedby over aria-errormessage was a conscious decision.

One issue might be that aria-errormessage seems to be intended for client side validation. It must be used with aria-invalid="true". See also ​https://github.com/w3c/aria/issues/2048 for a discussion of the differences between aria-describedby and aria-errormessage.

[Antoliny]

Thank you Tobias :)
I like this proposal.
I looked into the materials you provided and also researched aria-errormessage.

It does seem that providing error messages through aria-errormessage, instead of including both the error message and help text in aria-describedby, offers more advantages.
However, the problem lies in the support coverage of aria-errormessage.

It appears that aria-errormessage is not yet supported by macOS VoiceOver and TalkBack.
While it is supported by screen readers with higher market share( NVDA, JAWS, and iOS VoiceOver..), I wasn’t able to confidently triage this issue because of that limitation.

If we switch to using aria-errormessage, devices that don’t support it won’t read out the error message at all, which could actually make the experience worse than before.
So I think it would be best to get the accessibility team opinion on this.

[Clifford Gama]

Thanks @Antoliny0919 for the triage. Marking as Someday/Maybe because of limited coverage.

[Manish Tiwari]

Hello sir, @Antoliny0919 Should I start working on this issue if it's not assigned??

[Jacob Walls]

It is probably best to wait until we hear from the accessibility team and this ticket moves out of "Someday/Maybe" status.