Accessibility Issue - Inappropriate use of aria-pressed attribute #4469

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1. Lee Parrish (LeeParrishMSFT)

   assigned

   William Wong (compulim)

   on Oct 27, 2022
2. Lee Parrish (LeeParrishMSFT)

   added

   ExemptFromDailyDRIReportexempt from daily DRI reportexempt from daily DRI report

   on Oct 27, 2022
3. compulim commented on Oct 28, 2022

   

   William Wong (compulim)

   on Oct 28, 2022

   Collaborator

   More actions

   To DRI: Need more discussions with customers.

   The buttons in the Adaptive Card are for making decisions. When the "JUST enough" button is clicked, a decision is being made and it will be highlighted.

   When the end-user move the cursor and read the message again. The aria-pressed="true" will help them to identify which decision they had made, or in other words, which button they had clicked.

   This is a screenshot from our sample:

   

   When the button is being clicked, the button will be highlighted (in blue).

   We have some early accessibility reports saying the decision (i.e. button) cannot properly identified after the button is clicked. Thus, we added aria-pressed to make them a toggle button.

   I read a few WAI-ARIA articles but I could not find anything that would say the current usage is not great. There are things that I read along with excerpts:

   • WAI-ARIA aria-pressed state
     • Toggle buttons require a full press-and-release cycle to change their value. Activating it once changes the value to true, and activating it another time changes the value back to false. A value of mixed means that the values of more than one item controlled by the button do not all share the same value. If the attribute is not present, the button is not a toggle button.
   • WAI-ARIA-APG Button
     • Toggle button: A two-state button that can be either off (not pressed) or on (pressed). To tell assistive technologies that a button is a toggle button, specify a value for the attribute aria-pressed. For example, a button labelled mute in an audio player could indicate that sound is muted by setting the pressed state true.

   While I understand the button is not exactly toggleable: once it's pushed, it's pushed and cannot be popped. The aria-pressed seems still valid to use.

   Could you:

   • Tell us which part of WAI-ARIA, WAI-ARIA-APG or other WCAG articles we should read?
   • Instead of removing aria-pressed, could you tell us if there are better alternatives that we could use to indicate a decision?
4. William Wong (compulim)

   added

   area-accessibility

   external-adaptive-cards

   icmLinked from IcMLinked from IcM

   customer-replied-toRequired for internal reporting. Do not delete.Required for internal reporting. Do not delete.

   on Oct 28, 2022
5. William Wong (compulim)

   added this to the imminent milestone on Oct 29, 2022
6. compulim commented on Jan 10, 2023

   

   William Wong (compulim)

   on Jan 10, 2023

   Collaborator

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   Pending for suggestions on: "what ARIA role/attributes to use for one-off decision making buttons".
7. OEvgeny commented on Oct 21, 2026

   

   Eugene (OEvgeny)

   on Oct 21, 2026

   Collaborator

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   Thanks for the report.

   Card action buttons had aria-pressed, so that the choice a user made stayed available to screen readers. However, screen readers announce such buttons as toggle buttons ("toggle button, not pressed"), although these buttons never toggle back. #5900 makes them plain buttons:

   • After Adaptive Cards performs an action, its button is described as "Selected" (aria-describedby) and gets the adaptive-card-renderer__action--selected class instead of aria-pressed="true".
   • A Submit whose inputs fail validation is not marked.
   • Announce "Selected" when a card action is pressed #5928 also announces "Selected" when the action is pressed.

   The role is now button, and the choice is still exposed, through the description (WCAG 4.1.2). Hosts with CSS for .ac-pushButton[aria-pressed='true'] should target .ac-pushButton.adaptive-card-renderer__action--selected instead. Both changes are on main and will ship in the next release.

   We are closing this issue as fixed by #5900 and #5928. Please reopen if a card action is still announced as a toggle button on a build that includes them.
8. Eugene (OEvgeny)

   closed this as completedon Oct 21, 2026