Screen reader response for backspace is flaky

[marijnh]

Most screen readers will read the deleted character (possibly in another register) when you press backspace (or delete). Since the library handles backspace key events in code, the user action is less transparent to screen readers. Both NVDA and VoiceOver do seem to have a heuristic that causes them to still read the character in this case, but for both this is unreliable in contenteditable fields (and doesn't work at all on some browsers).

One possible workaround would be to let backspace/delete's native behavior go through, and then patch up the resulting state from the code. This is somewhat similar to the existing hack to detect backspace on Android. But it's going to be a hack, and likely cause annoying side effects.

[thomas992]

after disabling the backspace the first major bug I discovered came after I started a for loop with auto completion
imgur
backspace works to delete all the three different spots of highlighted text surprisingly, however after typing ff and pressing backspace this is what it looks like

[thomas992]

I was unable to replicate the original issue with the screen reader I downloaded. The Chrome extension worked perfectly but Orca screen reader, when deleting a ) it would tell me about a left one and a right one.