Known accessibility issues

Sometimes we find issues which are not unique to services. These can be due to bugs in the assistive software or in the common components we use.

macOS Voice Over does not automatically announce some error descriptions

Since Safari 17, Voice Over on macOS announces content from aria-describedby differently. In previous versions of Safari, this content was announced automatically, after a pause. Since Safari 17, this content is not announced automatically, instead, an announcement is given to “Press control option command slash to bring up the more content menu”.

This is important as a common pattern in the GOV.UK Design System is to associate error descriptions with input fields using aria-describedby. This issue is reported as only affecting some input types: radio, checkbox, submit, reset, button, file and range input types do not seem to exhibit this behaviour.

You can read more about this issue:

ARIA attributes not allowed on conditional reveals

When running automated tests, if the page contains conditional reveals activated by radios buttons, then Axe may raise an error which reads:
ARIA attribute is not allowed: aria-expanded="false"

The issue happens because the aria-expanded attribute is not allowed on radio buttons, although W3C Validator and SiteImprove do not flag it as a HTML error. The aria-expanded attribute is added to radios and checkboxes for conditional reveals to provide information to screen reader users that activating the control expands some content. Use of this attribute on this role is part of an ongoing discussion with the ARIA working group.

Other concerns are about conditional reveals more generally. Research conducted by GDS along with the Digital Accessibility Centre has shown that, as long as your reveals contain no more than a single input, they shouldn’t cause many issues.

Related GitHub issues

GOV.UK Details component may not work with Dragon

When using Dragon, the GOV.UK Details component will not work with any of the link commands. The Details component has been styled to look like a link but it behaves like a button.

This is a potential failure of WCAG 4.1.2 - Name, Role, Value, although it has not been flagged as one. The reason it might be a failure is that it looks like a link but cannot be programmatically determined to be one.

It recommended that you do not use the details component. Aside from the potential accessibility failure, research shows that users often miss the information they hide as they don’t understand how the component works.

Only have content on the page which your users need. If you have to hide content, then decide if it’s really needed or if the page can be broken into multiple pages.

You can read more about this:
Github comment about Details component being a potential WCAG fail

JAWS cannot see headings inside fieldsets

There is an issue where JAWS does not read out headings which are inside fieldset tags. The issue only seems to happen in the Internet Explorer (IE) browser, so it could be a good idea to recommend that your users use a different browser in your Accessibility Statement.

This affects most GOV.UK services using the 1 thing per page approach as components such as radios and checkboxes nest the H1 inside the legend tag.

The issue is with JAWS and not with the GOV.UK Design System components. The issue has been raised with Freedom Scientific who would be responsible for fixing it.

You can read more about this issue:
Github issue about JAWS not reading out headings.

Screen readers read out P45 as 45p

When referring to the tax document known as a P45, a screen reader will sometimes read out 45p.

We found that the language settings of the device caused the issue. If the device is set to USA English then it read out ‘P45’. But if the device was set to British English, the screen reader assumed ‘P45’ to be currency and instead read out 45p.

We found that we could fix the issue for JAWS by adding a visually hidden non- breaking space. However NVDA would still read out 45p. For example:

P<span class="govuk-visually-hidden">&nbsp;</span>45

We recommend adding the visually hidden non-breaking space and adding the following paragraph to your accessibility statement:

We know some screen readers will read out the tax form known as a Pay as you earn 45 as 45p. This happens if your language is set to British English and your screen reader assumes it is money.