Accessibility Issue: 4.1.3 Status Messages - User Not Informed of Additional Content

[alexarobu]

Describe the bug
Hi, during a recent accessibility test on one of our GeoNetwork instances we got flagged the following issue:

When viewing the search results page, it has been observed that when interacting with the filters or inputting a search, the user is not informed of changes that occur on the page dynamically. This is seen when the filters/search feature returns results dynamically when selected. This may result in users missing out on some content/ not knowing that the page has been updated.

I tried to change the span in facet.html responsible for the tickbox

core-geonetwork/web-ui/src/main/resources/catalog/components/elasticsearch/directives/partials/facet.html

Lines 23 to 27 in 523f4fc

	<span
	class="fa fa-fw"
	ng-class="ctrl.isInSearch(ctrl.facet, ctrl.item) ? 'fa-check-square' : 'fa-square-o'"
	>
	</span>

to be announced by the screen reader by changing it to

<span
  class="fa fa-fw"
  ng-class="ctrl.isInSearch(ctrl.facet, ctrl.item) ? 'fa-check-square' : 'fa-square-o'"
  aria-label="{{(ctrl.isInSearch(ctrl.facet, ctrl.item) ? 'filterActive' : 'filterInactive') | translate}}"
  role="status"
  >
</span>

but this doesn't seem to work entirely, as sometimes the focus seems to be shifted somewhere else, and the screen reader ends up announcing both filterActive and filterInactive states. I couldn't tell where the issue came from to be able to prevent this from happening.

Equally, adding the aria-live="true" attribute to the search box doeasn't seem to have the desired results, I suspect it's not the search box that needs to be monitored for change, but the Active filters section of the filter facets.

Would you be able to shed some light on how we would be able to improve this? 🙏

To Reproduce
Steps to reproduce the behaviour:

1. Navigate to the search page
2. Activate the screen reader on your device (tested on Android 13 using the TalkBack function)
3. Select any filter facet
4. Observe how there is no update on the fact that the page has changed

Expected behaviour
It is expected that any visual status messages are also presented via assistive technologies in real-time. e.g. if a user submits a form, text appears without page load reading "Your form was successfully submitted.", then a screen reader should announce the same message.

See https://www.w3.org/WAI/WCAG22/Understanding/status-messages.html