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.
