Announce Button's disabled links to assistive tech

[burieberry]

Button has styled a hrefless anchor as a disabled link for a while — the CSS matches a.boxel-button:not([href]), [href=''] and .disabled-link, applying opacity: 0.5, the disabled colour and pointer-events: none. But the @as='anchor' branch only suppresses the href: no disabled attribute, no aria-disabled. So the state has been visual-only for every caller, and @disabled={{true}} on an anchor produced DOM identical to just omitting @href.

  <a
    class={{classes}}
    href={{unless @disabled (if @href (sanitizeHtml @href))}}
+   role={{if @disabled 'link'}}
+   aria-disabled={{if @disabled 'true'}}
    data-test-boxel-button
    ...attributes
  >

Two things worth reviewing rather than skimming

role='link' is the part that does the work. An <a> we've stripped the href from is not a link — it maps to the generic role, where aria-disabled is not supported and browsers drop it. Adding aria-disabled alone would have looked like a fix and changed nothing observable.

Keyed on @disabled only, deliberately never on a falsy @href. Inferring from @href was my first instinct and it would have introduced a bug: callers legitimately pass href as a plain attribute through ...attributes, where @href is undefined but the link is real. Two in-tree examples, both href='#top':

• packages/base/skill-plus.gts
• packages/base/default-templates/theme-dashboard.gts

Those would have been labelled unavailable. There's a test guarding exactly that case.

Blast radius

Anchor-Button callers surveyed. Only one passes @disabled, and it gains the intended behaviour for free:

• packages/host/app/components/operator-mode/publish-realm-modal.gts — @as='anchor' with @disabled={{this.isUnpublishingAnyRealms}}, in two places

The rest pass a real @href or a plain href attribute and are unaffected: host-submode.gts, host-submode/open-site-popover.gts, skill-plus.gts, theme-dashboard.gts.

Tests

Adds packages/boxel-ui/test-app/tests/integration/components/button-test.gts — the first test coverage Button has. Six tests: default/@as='button' tag, anchor href sanitisation, the disabled-anchor role/aria-disabled pair, the enabled-anchor negative case, the ...attributes regression guard, and the native disabled attribute on <button>.

I could not run them locally, and I'd rather say so than imply otherwise. The boxel-ui test-app harness dies at boot with Uncaught TypeError: window.require is not a function before any test executes. It fails identically on a stashed clean tree with an untouched accordion-test, and again after mise run build:ui (the step CI runs first), so it is pre-existing and unrelated to this change. What did pass locally, in both addon and test-app: eslint, ember-template-lint, ember-tsc --noEmit. CI's Boxel UI Tests job is the first real execution of these assertions — please don't merge on my word that they pass.

That local breakage may deserve its own issue; it's plausibly why Button had no tests to begin with.

Follow-ups this unblocks

Tracked on CS-12305, which lists the three places that assert the current behaviour and go stale together when this lands:

1. boxel-home sections/hero-section.gts — drop the hand-passed aria-disabled and its TODO (boxel-ui, CS-12305) comment (boxel-home#70)
2. boxel-skills skills/boxel-ui-guidelines/references/use-boxel-ui-components.md — remove the dated version note (boxel-skills#103)
3. boxel-skills Skill/boxel-ui-guidelines.md — the same note in the mirrored tree

Also noted there: this makes the surrounding convention more load-bearing, not less. Today a plain label written as a hrefless anchor is merely silent to assistive tech; afterwards it will actively announce itself as an unavailable link. Whether an optional href means "unavailable link" or "not a link" becomes a decision authors have to make deliberately.

Draft until CI has actually run the tests.

🤖 Drafted by Claude (Opus 5).

🤖 Generated with Claude Code

[github-actions]

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3 654 tests 3 639 ✅ 15 💤 0 ❌
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Results for commit 21b5ff5.

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Results for commit 21b5ff5.