Accessibility work on the UI layer, all of it rooted in one structural gap:
there were no form primitives, so every field was hand-assembled and every
field got the same details wrong.
Form primitives
- components/ui/Field.tsx (Field/TextField/SelectField/TextareaField) and
Button.tsx. Field generates the control id with useId and derives htmlFor
from it, which is what makes the association impossible to omit rather
than merely conventional.
- 92 labels existed, 4 used htmlFor, and no input carried an id at all: a
screen reader announced an unnamed edit box and clicking a label focused
nothing. Now every label resolves to its control (0 unassociated), and the
input class chain that appeared verbatim 85 times appears zero times.
- Field also takes a render prop, so Lookup, CountryPicker and Picklist get
the same wiring instead of a second, partial solution.
- SearchInput replaces three hand-rolled copies of the icon-in-a-box search
whose input had only a placeholder — not a label — and killed its own
focus ring with outline-none and nothing in its place.
- Toggle groups (workdays, reorg change type) became fieldsets with
aria-pressed; colour alone was carrying the selected state.
Comboboxes
- Lookup and CountryPicker were text inputs with a div of clickable buttons
underneath: typeable, but no keyboard path to a result and nothing telling
a screen reader a list had appeared. Both now carry role=combobox,
aria-expanded/controls/activedescendant and listbox semantics, with arrow
keys, Enter and Escape. Escape stops propagation, or it would close the
surrounding dialog along with the dropdown.
Dialogs
- useDialogFocus centralises what Modal and SlideOver each owed the
keyboard and neither provided beyond Escape: focus into the dialog on
open, Tab and Shift+Tab cycling within it, focus restored to the trigger
on close.
- SlideOver stays mounted for its transition, and aria-hidden does not
remove anything from the tab order — so every closed panel was leaving
invisible tab stops at the end of the page. `inert` fixes that.
Route states
- loading.tsx, error.tsx, not-found.tsx and global-error.tsx. Every page in
the (app) group is server-rendered per request, so without loading.tsx a
navigation showed nothing at all until the server answered, and a render
error dropped the user on Next's own screen with no way back.
Tests
- 22 component tests (vitest jsdom project). Two of them found limits of the
environment rather than of the code: jsdom implements neither `inert` nor
scrollIntoView, so the inert test asserts the attribute and the missing
scrollIntoView — which was taking the whole render down from inside an
effect — is stubbed in the setup file.
- components/hire/: 4-step Hire Wizard (Person/Position/Vertrag/
Zusammenfassung) matching sec4.4, with a HireWizardProvider context so it
can be opened both from the global "+ Neueinstellung" button and from a
"Fortsetzen" link on a saved draft.
- actions/hireDrafts.ts: save/delete hire_drafts (owner-scoped RLS already
in place from Phase 1). Dashboard now shows the "Entwuerfe" card the
Phase 1 plan deferred, since the wizard it depends on now exists.
- lib/positions.ts: shared open-positions loader (position number, org
breadcrumb, resolved manager name) used by both the wizard and (later)
the Positions page.
Two real bugs found via live testing and fixed in supabase/functions.sql:
1. hire_employee/rehire_employee: a two-branch CASE returning bare string
literals defaults to `text`, not the target enum, so `status = case
when ... then 'Geplant' else 'Aktiv' end` failed against the
employment_status column. Fixed with an explicit ::employment_status
cast on the whole CASE expression.
2. Postgres precedence gotcha: ->> and || sit at the *same* precedence
tier and left-associate, so `payload->>'first_name' || ' ' ||
payload->>'last_name'` does not group the way it reads - it tries to
apply ->> to an intermediate text value and fails with "operator does
not exist: text ->> unknown". Fixed by parenthesizing every ->>'...'
expression that participates in a || chain.
Also fixed: hire_employee referenced v_position.title outside the branch
that assigns v_position, raising "record not assigned" whenever a hire
wasn't tied to a position_id; extracted a v_job_title variable instead.
Verified live end-to-end: wizard search -> select position -> submit
creates the employee, closes the position, and writes matching
employee_history + audit_log rows atomically.
