WAI-Aria state for active widget

Question

Is there a state to show that an widget is active. For example a user tabs in a listbox and navigate with up and down keys through the items. Is there a state for the listbox that shows the user is in it?

Answer 1

No, generally the user agent would be able to determine that through the DOM and the focus or active events. If for some reason you were wanting to be inside a list but not focused on an item, you could set aria-selected to false.

http://www.w3.org/TR/wai-aria/states_and_properties#aria-selected

Answer 2

Checkout the wai-aria authoring guide for widgets. It will tell you what you need per widget. Depending on the widget you do want to set the tabindex and aria-selected among other things.

http://www.w3.org/TR/wai-aria-practices/