form-token-field/TokenInput: Fix automatic focus on first render due to updating selected value from async stores

[alexstine]

What?

Fixes #42285

Adds code to TokenInput to detect two things.

1. If it is the first render. This is determined by looking at the value variable. If one is passed in, this means there will be a dynamic selection index update which will cause focus.
2. Once the TokenInput gains focus by a user, first render goes to false.

Why?

This is a nasty A11Y bug that needs to go away.

How?

I think, magic.

Testing Instructions

1. Have at least 25 users on a site with editor privileges or above.
2. Edit an existing post or page.
3. Notice how focus is not placed on the author combo box.

Screenshots or screencast

[github-actions[bot]]

Size Change: +26 B (0%)

Total Size: 1.26 MB

Filename	Size	Change
build/block-editor/index.min.js	166 kB	+21 B (0%)
build/components/index.min.js	199 kB	+5 B (0%)

ℹ️ View Unchanged

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_{compressed-size-action}

[alexstine]

@ciampo I understand the problem very clearly. In Firefox with NVDA on Windows, the aria-activedescendant property temporarily places focus on the combo box control token input because we are setting the initial value. The reason this happens is because the selection index is updated in the aria-activedescendant attribute and this makes ARIA think the user did this. So by design, this moves focus to the token input since the token input controls changing the selection.

This is certainly a code problem because aria-activedescendant in this case is a bad design principal. If you look at most of the online official W3C tutorials, it shows this used 2 ways:

1. Without an initial option value set;
2. In a accordion style menu where it must be activated via a button first.

If you have other ideas on how to fix, open to discussion. Otherwise, I'd like to find a way to make this work as placing focus on a combo box hurts my workflow as an Accessibility Team rep because that is where focus goes every time I add/edit a post on the Make WordPress Accessible site. Due to the fact there are more than 25 users to select from.

[alexstine]

@ciampo Out of interest, what did you think of this approach?

https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/pull/44347/commits/819fe4d98729c56a4cb5903d673c44e78a02a9b1

This, in my opinion, is much more of a mess because we are guessing developers intent. Essentially, I am trying to guess when the initial render is done and when the async updating finishes. Based on this, that is when I dynamically apply the aria-activedescendant attribute. This case does not force focus for screen readers because I apply the attribute after the async update has populated the initial selection index.

Thoughts?

[ciampo]

Thank you @alexstine for your determination in working on an alternative approach! Apologies if I'm not being very responsive, but I've been having a busy week (and I won't be around much next week too).

If I understand this new approach correctly, the idea is to add the aria-activedescendant attribute only when necessary — i.e. when a valid suggestion is highlighted.

If that's the case, I suggest a few improvements:

• instead of adding a new inputHasFocus prop on the TokenInput component, we could just directly listen to focus and blur events internally to the component and keep track of whether the input has focus with internal state
  • The fact that we're using internal state to track focus instead of the inputHasFocus means that this same improvement will be applied to other components using TokenInput (i.e. FormTokenField)
• we should probably use the isExpanded prop in the check as well, because it doesn't make sense to add the aria-activedescendant attribute if the list of suggestions is not rendered in the DOM.

I applied these ideas to a separate PR: #44526. It would be great if you could take a look and let me know if the changes proposed in that PR make sense to you and test well