Description
General Information
VFS team name
Veteran Facing Forms
VFS product name
Product 21-0972 Alternate Signer
VFS feature name
product 21-0972 alternate signer
Point of Contact/Reviewers
Brian DeConinck - @briandeconinck - Accessibility
*For more information on how to interpret this ticket, please refer to the Anatomy of a Staging Review issue ticket guidance on Platform Website.
Platform Issue
No VA.gov Experience Standard for the issue found.
Issue Details
On the Statement of Truth, only the last line of the statement ("I confirm that...") is announced by screen readers. Screen reader users who tab to the name input won't hear anything about the penalty of perjury, the potential for VA to request further documentation, or examples of that documentation.
Link, screenshot or steps to recreate
VA.gov Experience Standard
Category Number 00, Issue Number 00
Other References
Platform Recommendation
From chatting with @jeana-adhoc and looking at the component, I see that this is coming from a technical limitation. The component is self-contained and can't be aria-describedby something outside of itself, and any text included with the component has to be passed through the component props --- which only take a string.
We landed on "use aria-describedby to connect the statement of truth to the name input" as sort of a quick-and-dirty solution earlier this year, and I think maybe we're running into the limits of that quick-and-dirty solution. I think it's probably time to revisit this and see if we can come up with something better.
In terms of accessibility requirements, I would want the statement of truth text to be somehow associated with a tab stop. The text doesn't necessarily have to be read out when you hit that tab stop, but the user needs to be aware that the text exists so they can decide if they want to hear it. The tab stop also needs to be an actual interactive element (not adding an arbitrary tabindex value on a static element) to preserve the keyboard interaction patterns users expect.
Jeana and I previously pitched putting the statement of truth in an additional info component and changing the additional info component so that it could be set open by default --- so you hit the additional info toggle and that prompts you to either listen to the statement of truth or keep tabbing to the next thing. That suggestion was rejected by the Design System Council, I think because they felt it wasn't really an appropriate use of the additional info component and folks weren't comfortable with changing that element for this use case.
Maybe we could do something involving a "Statement of Truth" link that takes you back up the page to the SoT heading?
VFS Guidance
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Activity