Keyboard accessibility of issues reactions toolbar

[thibaudcolas]

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I’d like to consider reactions to encourage contributors to vote on issues, but have stumbled upon a few accessibility gotchas, that seem like they’re bugs in the implementation.

Keyboard focus of reactions switch buttons

The reactions "switch" buttons seem to be the only way to view the list of usernames who used a given reaction. But for some reason those buttons are only focusable when logged out. Logged into GitHub, the button has tabindex="-1", so it’s impossible for keyboard users to view who voted on what.

Here’s the keyboard focus state for an anonymous user (working well):

And here it is for a logged-in user, note how the switch button isn’t reachable:

ARIA label of reaction switch buttons

Different but related issue – the switch buttons also have an aria-label. Here’s the label for the "👍️ 7" button in the example above:

Unreact with 👍 (5 👍 reactions so far, including username, username, username, username, username and 2 more)

There are a few puzzling aspects / problems here:

• As far as I can see the label is set up the wrong way around. It says "React" when I have reacted (aria-checked="true"). And "Unreact" when I haven’t reacted (aria-checked="false")
• The "5 👍 " is confusing. It would be clearer as "7 👍 " to match the visible count without screen reader users having to read through the whole label to understand they’re meant to add "2 more"
• For speech recognition users, "React/Unreact with 👍" is going to be tricky to guess. to interact with the button. And for Voice Control users they can’t guess the full label that they’d need to say to interact. So it’d be better to move this text from aria-label to aria-describedby / aria-description

Hope this helps, please let me know if there’s a better place to report this

[github-actions[bot]]

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