Barker Library - QH70.U62 N485 2019

Sometimes a cool glitchy, distorted effect is the perfect addition to your web design. Maybe you’re creating a tech site, a developer’s portfolio, or something completely experimental. Distortion effects are an unconventional but interesting way to grab visitors’ attention …

Julie Grundy kicks off this, our fifteenth year, by diving headlong into the snowy issue of customising form inputs. Nothing makes a more special gift at Christmas that something you’ve designed and customised yourself. But can it be done while staying accessible to every user?

In my work as an accessibility consultant, there are some frequent problems I find on people’s websites. One that’s come up a lot recently is that people are making custom select inputs for their forms. I can tell that people are trying to make them accessible, because they’ve added ARIA attributes or visually-hidden instructions for screen reader users. Sometimes they use a plugin which claims to be accessible. And this is great, I love that folks want to do the right thing! But so far I’ve never come across a custom select input which actually meets all of the WCAG AA criteria.

Often I recommend to people that they use the native HTML select element instead. Yes, they’re super ugly, but as Scott Jehl shows us in his article Styling a Select Like It’s 2019 they are a lot easier to style than they used to be. They come with a lot of accessibility for free – they’re recognised and announced clearly by all screen reader software, they work reliably and predictably with keyboards and touch, and they look good in high contrast themes.

But sometimes, I can’t recommend the select input as a replacement. We want a way for someone to choose an item from a list of options, but it’s more complicated than just that. We want autocomplete options. We want to put images in there, not just text. The optgroup element is ugly, hard to style, and not announced by screen readers. The focus styles are low contrast. I had high hopes for the datalist element, but although it works well with screen readers, it’s no good for people with low vision who zoom or use high contrast themes.

Select inputs are limited in a lot of ways. They’re frustrating to work with when you have something which looks almost like what you want, but is too restricted to be useful. We know we can do better, so we make our own.

Let’s work out how to do that while keeping all the accessibility features of the original.

Semantic HTML

We’ll start with a solid, semantic HTML base. A select input is essentially a text input which restricts the possible answers, so let’s make a standard input.

<label for="custom-select">User Type</label>
<input type="text" id="custom-select">

Then we need to show everyone who can see that there are options available, so let’s add an image with an arrow, like the native element.

<label for="custom-select">User Type</label>
<input type="text" id="custom-select">
<img src="arrow-down.svg" alt="">

For this input, we’re going to use ARIA attributes to represent the information in the icon, so we’ll give it an empty alt attribute so screen readers don’t announce its filename.

Finally, we want a list of options. An unordered list element is a sensible choice here. It also lets screen reader software understand that these bits of text are related to each other as part of a group.

<ul class="custom-select-options">
  <li>User</li>
  <li>Author</li>
  <li>Editor</li>
  <li>Manager</li>
  <li>Administrator</li>
</ul>

You can dynamically add or remove options from this list whenever you need to. And, unlike our <option> element inside a <select>, we can add whatever we like inside the list item. So if you need images to distinguish between lots of very similar-named objects, or to add supplementary details, you can go right ahead. I’m going to add some extra text to mine, to help explain the differences between the choices.

This is a good base to begin with. But it looks nothing like a select input! We want to make sure our sighted users get something they’re familiar with and know how to use already.

Styling with CSS

I’ll add some basic styles similar to what’s in Scott Jehl’s article above.

We also need to make sure that people who customise their colours in high contrast modes can still tell what they’re looking at. After checking it in the default Windows high contrast theme, I’ve decided to add a left-hand border to the focus and hover styles, to make sure it’s clear which item is about to be chosen.

This would be a good time to add any dark-mode styles if that’s your jam. People who get migraines from bright screens will thank you!

JavaScript for behaviour

Of course, our custom select doesn’t actually do anything yet. We have a few tasks for it: to toggle the options list open and closed when we click the input, to filter the options when people type in the input, and for selecting an option to add it to the input and close the list. I’m going to tackle toggling first because it’s the easiest.

Toggling

Sometimes folks use opacity or height to hide content on screen, but that’s like using Harry Potter’s invisibility cloak. No-one can see what’s under there, but Harry doesn’t cease to exist and you can still poke him with a wand. In our case, screen reader and keyboard users can still reach an invisible list.

Instead of making the content see-through or smaller, I’m going to use display: none to hide the list. display: none removes the content from the accessibility tree, so it can’t be accessed by any user, not just people who can see. I always have a pair of utility classes for hiding things, as follows:

.hidden-all {
  display: none;
}

.hidden-visually {
    position: absolute;
    width: 1px;
    height: 1px;
    padding: 0;
    overflow: hidden;
    clip: rect(0,0,0,0);
    white-space: nowrap;
    -webkit-clip-path: inset(50%);
    clip-path: inset(50%);
    border: 0;
} 

So now I can just toggle the CSS class .hidden-all on my list whenever I like.

Browsing the options

Opening up our list works well for our mouse and touch-screen users. Our styles give a nice big tap target for touch, and mouse users can click wherever they like.

We need to make sure our keyboard users are taken care of though. Some of our sighted users will be relying on the keyboard if they have mobility or dexterity issues. Usually our screen reader users are in Browse mode, which lets them click the arrow keys to navigate through content. However, custom selects are usually inside form elements. which pushes screen reader software to Forms Mode. In Forms mode, the screen reader software can only reach focusable items when the user clicks the Tab key, unless we provide an alternative. Our list items are not focusable by default, so let’s work on that alternative.

To do this, I’m adding a tabindex of -1 to each list item. This way I can send focus to them with JavaScript, but they won’t be part of the normal keyboard focus path of the page.

csOptions.forEach(function(option) {
    option.setAttribute('tabindex, '-1')
}) 

Now I can move the focus using the Up and Down arrow keys, as well as with a mouse or tapping the screen. The activeElement property of the document is a way of finding where the keyboard focus is at the moment. I can use that to loop through the elements in the list and move the focus point forward or back, depending on which key is pressed.

function doKeyAction(whichKey) {
  const focusPoint = document.activeElement
  switch(whichKey) {
    case: 'ArrowDown':
      toggleList('Open')
      moveFocus(focusPoint, 'forward')
      break
    case: 'ArrowUp':
      toggleList('Open')
      moveFocus(focusPoint, 'back')
      break
  }
}

Selecting

The Enter key is traditional for activating an element, and we want to match the original select input.

We add another case to the keypress detector…

case 'Enter':
  makeChoice(focusPoint)
  toggleList('Shut')
  setState('closed')
  break 

… then make a function which grabs the currently focused item and puts it in our text input. Then we can close the list and move focus up to the input as well.

function makeChoice(whichOption) {
    const optionText = whichOption.documentQuerySelector('strong')
    csInput.value = optionText
}

Filtering

Standard select inputs have keyboard shortcuts – typing a letter will send focus to the first item in the option which begins with that letter. If you type the letter again, focus will move to the next option beginning with that letter.

This is useful, but there’s no clue to tell users how many options might be in this category, so they have to experiment to find out. We can make an improvement for our users by filtering to just the set of options which matches that letter or sequence of letters. Then sighted users can see exactly how many options they’ve got, and continue filtering by typing more if they like. (Our screen reader users can’t see the remaining options while they’re typing, but don’t worry – we’ll have a solution for them in the next section).

I’m going to use the .filter method to make a new array which only has the items which match the text value of the input. There are different ways you could do this part – my goal was to avoid having to use regex, but you should choose whatever method works best for your content.

function doFilter() {
  const terms = csInput.value
  const aFilteredOptions = aOptions.filter(option => {
    if (option.innerText.toUpperCase().startsWith(terms.toUpperCase())) {
    return true
    }
  })
  // hide all options
  csOptions.forEach(option => option.style.display = "none")
  // re-show the options which match our terms
  aFilteredOptions.forEach(function(option) {
    option.style.display = ""
  })
} 

Nice! This is now looking and behaving really well. We’ve got one more problem though – for a screen reader user, this is a jumble of information. What’s being reported to the browser’s accessibility API is that there’s an input followed by some clickable text. Are they related? Who knows! What happens if we start typing, or click one of the clicky text things? It’s a mystery when you can’t see what’s happening. But we can fix that.

ARIA

ARIA attributes don’t provide much in the way of additional features. Adding an aria-expanded='true' attribute doesn’t actually make anything expand. What ARIA does is provide information about what’s happening to the accessibility API, which can then pass it on to any assistive technology which asks for it.

The WCAG requirements tell us that when we’re making custom elements, we need to make sure that as a whole, the widget tells us its name, its role, and its current value. Both Chrome and Firefox reveal the accessibility tree in their dev tools, so you can check how any of your widgets will be reported.

We already have a name for our input – it comes from the label we associated to the text input right at the start. We don’t need to name every other part of the field, as that makes it seem like more than one input is present. We also don’t need to add a value, because when we select an item from the list, it’s added to the text input and therefore is exposed to the API.

But our screen readers are going to announce this custom select widget as a text entry field, with some images and a list nearby.

The ARIA Authoring Practices site has a pattern for comboboxes with listboxes attached. It tells you all the ARIA you need to make screen reader software give a useful description of our custom widget.

I’m going to add all this ARIA via JavaScript, instead of putting it in the HTML. If my JavaScript doesn’t work for any reason, the input can still be a plain text field, and we don’t want screen readers to announce it as anything fancier than that.

csSelector.setAttribute('role', 'combobox') 
csSelector.setAttribute('aria-haspopup', 'listbox')
csSelector.setAttribute('aria-owns', '#list') 
csInput.setAttribute('aria-autocomplete', 'both')
csInput.setAttribute('aria-controls', 'list')

The next thing to do is let blind users know if the list is opened or closed. For that task I’m going to add an aria-expanded attribute to the group, and update it from false to true whenever the list changes state in our toggling function.

The final touch is to add a secret status message to the widget. We can use it to update the number of options available after we’ve filtered them by typing into the input. When there are a lot of options to choose from, this helps people who can’t see the list reducing know if they’re on the right track or not.

To do that we first have to give the status message a home in our HTML.

<div id='custom-select-status' class='hidden-visually' aria-live='polite'></div>

I’m using our visually-hidden style so that only screen readers will find it. I’m using aria-live so that it will be announced as often as it updates, not just when a screen reader user navigates past it. Live regions need to be present at page load, but we won’t have anything to say about the custom select then so we can leave it empty for now.

Next we add one line to our filtering function, to find the length of our current list.

updateStatus(aFilteredOptions.length)

Then we send that to a function which will update our live region.

function updateStatus(howMany) {
    console.log('updating status')
    csStatus.textContent = howMany + " options available."
}

Conclusion

Let’s review what we’ve done to make an awesome custom select input:

• Used semantic HTML so that it’s easily interpreted by assistive technology while expanding the types of content we can include in it
• Added CSS styles which are robust enough to survive different visual environments while also fitting into our branding needs
• Used JavaScript to provide the basic functionality that the native element has
• Added more JavaScript to get useful functionality that the native element lacks
• Carefully added ARIA attributes to make sure that the purpose and results of using the element are available to assistive technology and are updated as the user interacts with it.

You can check out my custom select pattern on GitHub – I’ll be making additions as I test it on more assistive technology, and I welcome suggestions for improvements.

The ARIA pattern linked above has a variety of examples and customisations. I hope stepping through this example shows you why each of the requirements exists, and how you can make them fit your own needs.

I think the volume of custom select inputs out there shows the ways in which the native select input is insufficient for modern websites. You’ll be pleased to know that Greg Whitworth and Simon Pieters are working on improving several input types! You can let them know what features you’d like selects to have. But until that work pays off, let’s make our custom selects as accessible and robust as they can possibly be.

About the author

Julie Grundy is an accessibility expert who works for Intopia, a digital accessibility consultancy. She has over 15 years experience as a front-end web developer in the health and education sectors. She believes in the democratic web and aims to unlock digital worlds for as many people as possible. In her spare time, she knits very slowly and chases very quickly after her two whippets.

More articles by Julie

Rachel Andrew guides us through a tour of the last fifteen years in CSS layout, as manifested in articles here on 24 ways. From the days when Internet Explorer 6 was de rigueur, right up to the modern age of evergreen browsers, the only thing you can be sure of is that the web never stands still for long.

I’ve written nine articles in the 15 years of 24 ways, and all but one of those articles had something to do with CSS. In this last year of the project, I thought I would take a look back at those CSS articles. It’s been an interesting journey, and by reading through my words from the last 15 years I discovered not only how much the web platform has evolved - but how my own thinking has shifted with it.

2005: CSS layout starting points

Latest web browser versions: Internet Explorer 6 (at this point 4 years old), IE5.1 Mac, Netscape 8, Firefox 1.5, Safari 2

Fifteen years ago, my contributions to 24 ways started with a piece about CSS layout. That article explored something I had been using in my own work. In 2005, most of the work I was doing was building websites from Photoshop files delivered to me by my design agency clients. I’d built up a set of robust, tried-and-tested CSS layouts to use to implement these. My starting point when approaching any project was to take a look at the static comps and figure out which layout I would use:

• Liquid, multiple column with no footer
• Liquid, multiple column with footer
• Fixed width, centred

At that point, there were still many sites being shipped with table-based layouts. We had learned how to use floats to create columns some four years earlier, however layout was still a difficult and often fragile thing. By developing patterns that I knew worked, where I had figured out any strange bugs, I saved myself a lot of time.

Of course, I wasn’t the only person thinking in this way. The two sites from which the early CSS for layout enthusiasts took most of their inspiration, had a library of patterns for CSS layout. The Noodle Incident little boxes is still online, glish.com/css is sadly only available at the Internet Archive.

This thinking was taken to a much greater extreme in 2011, when Twitter Bootstrap launched and starting with an entire framework for layout and much more became commonplace across the industry. While I understand the concern many folk have about every website ending up looking the same, back in 2005 I was a pragmatist. That has not changed. I’ve always built websites and run businesses alongside evangelizing web standards and contributing to the platform. I’m all about getting the job done, paying the bills, balancing that with trying to make things better so we don’t need to make as many compromises in the future. If that means picking from one of a number of patterns, that is often a very reasonable approach. Not everything needs to be a creative outpouring.

Today however, CSS Grid Layout and Flexbox mean that we can take a much more fluid approach to developing layouts. This enables the practical and the creative alike. The need for layout starting points - whether simple like mine, or a full framework like Bootstrap - seems to be decreasing, however in their place comes an interest in component libraries. This approach to development partly enabled by the fact that new layout makes it possible to drop a component into the middle of a layout without blowing the whole thing up.

2006: Faster Development with CSS Constants

Latest web browser versions: Internet Explorer 7, Netscape 8.1, Firefox 2, Safari 2

My article in 2006 was once again taken from the work I was doing as a developer. I’ve always been as much, if not more of a backend developer than a frontend one. In 2006, I was working in PHP on custom CMS implementations. These would also usually include the front-end work. Along with several other people in the industry I’d been experimenting with ways to use CSS “constants” as we all seemed to call them, by processing the CSS with our server-side language of choice.

The use case was mostly for development, although as a CMS developer, I could see the potential of allowing these values to be updated via the CMS. Perhaps to allow a content editor to change a color scheme.

Also in 2006, the first version of Sass was released, created by Hampton Catlin and Natalie Weizenbaum. Sass, LESS and other pre-processors began to give us a more streamlined and elegant way to achieve variables in CSS.

In 2009, the need for pre-processors purely for variables is disappearing. CSS now has Custom Properties - something I did not foresee in 2006. These “CSS Variables” are far more powerful than swapping out a value in a build process. They can be changed dynamically, based on something changing in the environment, rather than being statically set at build time.

2009: Cleaner Code with CSS3 Selectors

Latest web browser versions: Internet Explorer 8, Firefox 3.5, Safari 4, Chrome 3

After a break from writing for 24 ways, in 2009 I wrote this piece about CSS3 Selectors, complete with jQuery fallbacks due to the fact that some of these selectors were not usable in Internet Explorer 8.

Today these useful selectors have wide browser support, we also have a large number of new selectors which are part of the Level 4 specification. The changes section of the Level 4 spec gives an excellent rundown of what has been added over the years. Browser support for these newer selectors is more inconsistent, MDN has an excellent list with the page for each selector detailing current browser support and usage examples.

2012: Giving Content Priority with CSS3 Grid Layout

Latest web browser versions: Internet Explorer 10, Firefox 17, Safari 6, Chrome 23

My 2012 piece was at the beginning of my interest in the CSS Grid Layout specification. Earlier in 2012 I had attended a workshop given by Bert Bos, in which he demonstrated some early stage CSS modules, including the CSS Grid Layout specification. I soon discovered that there would be an implementation of Grid in IE10, the new browser shipped in September of 2012 and I set about learning how to use Grid Layout. This article was based on what I had learned.

The problem of source versus visual order

As a CMS developer I immediately linked the ability to lay out items and prioritize content, to the CMS and content editors. I was keen to find ways to allow content editors to prioritize content across breakpoints, and I felt that Grid Layout might allow us to do that. As it turned out, we are still some way away from that goal. While Grid does allow us to separate visual display from source order, it can come at a cost. Non-visual browsers, and the tab order of the document follow the source and not the visual display. This makes it easy to create a disconnected and difficult to use experience if we essentially jumble up the display of elements, moving them away from how they appear in the document. I still think that an issue we need to solve is how to allow developers to indicate that the visual display should be considered the correct order rather than the document order.

The Grid Specification moved on

Some of the issues in this early version of the grid spec were apparent in my article. I needed to use a pre-processor, to calculate the columns an element would span. This was partly due to the fact that the early grid specifications did not have a concept of the gap property. In addition the initial spec did not include auto-placement and therefore each item had to be explicitly placed onto the grid. The basics of the final specification were there, however over the years that followed the specification was refined and developed. We got gaps, and auto-placement, and the grid-template-areas property was introduced. By the time Grid shipped in Firefox, Chrome, and Safari many of the sticky things I had encountered when writing this article were resolved.

2015: Grid, Flexbox, Box Alignment: Our New System for Layout

Latest web browser versions: Edge 13, Firefox 43, Safari 9, Chrome 47

Grid still hadn’t shipped in more browsers but the specification had moved on. We had support for gaps, with the grid-row-gap, grid-column-gap and grid-gap properties. My own thinking about the specification, and the related specifications had developed. I had started teaching grid not as a standalone module, but alongside Flexbox and Box Alignment. I was trying to demonstrate how these modules worked together to create a layout system for modern web development.

Another place my thinking had moved on since my initial Grid article in 2012, was in terms of content reordering and accessibility. In July of 2015 I wrote an article entitled, Modern CSS Layout, Power and Responsibility in which I outlined these concerns.

Some things change, and some stay the same. The grid- prefixed gap properties were ultimately moved into the Box Alignment specification in order that they could be defined for Flex layout and any other layout method which in future required gaps. What I did not expect, was that four years on I would still be being asked about Grid versus Flexbox:

“A question I keep being asked is whether CSS grid layout and flexbox are competing layout systems, as though it might be possible to back the loser in a CSS layout competition. The reality, however, is that these two methods will sit together as one system for doing layout on the web, each method playing to certain strengths and serving particular layout tasks.”

2016: What next for CSS Grid Layout?

Latest web browser versions: Edge 15, Firefox 50, Safari 10, Chrome 55

In 2016, we still didn’t have Grid in browsers, and I was increasingly looking like I was selling CSS vaporware. However, with the spec at Candidate Recommendation, and it looking likely that we would have grid in at least two browsers in the spring, I wrote an article about what might come next for grid.

The main subject was the subgrid feature, which had by that point been removed from the Level 1 specification. The CSS Working Group were still trying to decide whether a version of subgrid locked to both dimensions would be acceptable. In this version we would have declared display: subgrid on the grid item, after which its rows and columns would be locked to the tracks of the parent. I am very glad that it was ultimately decided to allow for one-dimensional subgrids. This means that you can use the column tracks of the parent, yet have an implicit grid for the rows. This enables patterns such as the one I described in A design pattern solved by subgrid. At the end of 2019, we don’t yet have wide browser support for subgrid, however Firefox has already shipped the value in Firefox 71. Hopefully other browsers will follow suit.

Level 2 of the grid specification ultimately became all about adding support for subgrid, and so we don’t yet have any of the other features I mentioned in that piece. All of those features are detailed in issues in the CSS Working Group Github repo, and aren’t forgotten about. As we come to decide features for Level 3, perhaps some of them will make the cut.

It was worth waiting for subgrid, as the one-dimensional version gives us so much more power, and as I take a look back over these 24 ways articles it really underlines how much of a long game contributing to the platform is. I mentioned in the closing paragraph of my 2016 article that you should not feel ignored if your idea or use case is not immediately discussed and added to a spec, and that is still the case. Those of us involved in specifying CSS, and in implementing CSS in browsers care very much about your feedback. We have to balance that with the need for this stuff to be right.

2017: Christmas Gifts for Your Future Self: Testing the Web Platform

Latest web browser versions: Edge 16, Firefox 57, Safari 11, Chrome 63

In 2017 I stepped away from directly talking about layout, and instead published an article about testing. Not about testing your own code, but about the Web Platform Tests project, and how contributing to the tests which help to ensure interoperability between browsers could benefit the platform - and you.

This article is still relevant today as it was two years ago. I’m often asked by people how they can get involved with CSS, and testing is a great place to start. Specifications need tests in order to progress to become Recommendations, therefore contributing tests can materially help the progress of a spec. You can also help to free up the time of spec editors, to make edits to their specs, by contributing tests they might otherwise need to work on.

The Web Platform Tests project has recently got new and improved documentation. If you have some time to spare and would like to help, take a look and see if you can identify some places that are in need of tests. You will learn a lot about the CSS specs you are testing while doing so, and you can feel that you are making a useful and much-needed contribution to the development of the web platform.

2018: Researching a Property in the CSS Specifications

Latest web browser versions: Edge 17, Firefox 64, Safari 12, Chrome 71

I almost stayed away from layout in my 2018 piece, however I did feature the Grid Layout property grid-auto-rows in this article. If you want to understand how to dig up all the details of a CSS property, then this article is still useful.

One thing that has changed since I began writing for 24 ways, is the amount of great information available to help you learn CSS. Whether you are someone who prefers to read like me, or a person who learns best from video, or by following along with a tutorial, it’s all out there for you. You don’t have to rely on understanding the specifications, though I would encourage everyone to become familiar with doing so, if just to be able to fact check a tutorial which seems to be doing something other than the resulting code.

2019: And that’s a wrap

Latest web browser versions: Edge 18, Firefox 71, Safari 12, Chrome 79

This year is the final countdown for 24 ways. With so many other publications creating great content, perhaps there is less of a need for an avalanche of writing in the closing days of each year. The archive will stay as a history of what was important, what we were thinking, and the problems of the day - many of which we have now solved in ways that the authors could never have imagined at the time. I can see through my articles how my thinking evolved over the years, and I’m as excited about what comes next as I was back in 2005, wondering how to make CSS layout easier.

About the author

Rachel Andrew is a Director of edgeofmyseat.com, a UK web development consultancy and creators of the small content management system, Perch; a W3C Invited Expert to the CSS Working Group; and Editor in Chief of Smashing Magazine. She is the author of a number of books including The New CSS Layout for A Book Apart and a Google Developer Expert for Web Technologies.

She curates a popular email newsletter on CSS Layout, and is passing on her layout knowledge over at her CSS Layout Workshop.

When not writing about business and technology on her blog at rachelandrew.co.uk or speaking at conferences, you will usually find Rachel running up and down one of the giant hills in Bristol, or attempting to land a small aeroplane while training for her Pilot’s license.

More articles by Rachel

Cambridge, Mass. : National Bureau of Economic Research, 2020

Dewey Library - HX236.5.S6293 2020

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Dewey Library - HV6638.5.M4 M55 2019

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Hayden Library - U394.L58 T37 2018

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Long Beach, Calif. : Horizons Pub. ; Berlin : Springer, 2005

Berlin ; Springer ; [2006]