We now use ARIA live regions to announce when results become available
and how to navigate through the list of suggestions. The announcements
can be configured via the messages option, which has two properties:
noResults for when no items are returned and results for when at least
one item is returned. In general, you would only need to change these
options if you want the string to be written in a different language.
The messages option is subject to change in future versions while we
work on a full solution for string manipulation and
internationalization across all plugins. If you’re interested in the
messages option, we encourage you to just read the source; the
relevant code is at the very bottom of the autocomplete plugin and is
only a few lines.
...
So how does this apply to the autocomplete widget? Well, now when you
search for an item, if you have a screen reader installed it will read
you something like “1 result is available, use up and down arrow keys
to navigate.”. Pretty cool, huh?
So if you go to github and look at the autocomplete source code, around line 571 you'll see where this is actually implemented.
The top answer here achieves the desired visual effect, but defeats the object of jQuery having ARIA support, and is a bit dickish to users who rely upon it! Those who've mentioned that jQuery CSS hides this for you are correct, and this is the style which does that:
Style it how the jQuery theme itself styles it. A lot of the other answers suggest including a whole stylesheet, but if you just want the relevant CSS, this is how it's done in http://code.jquery.com/ui/1.9.0/themes/smoothness/jquery-ui.css:
The jQuery CSS .ui-helper-hidden-accessible is in the themes/base/core.css file. You should include this file (at a minimum) in your stylesheets for forward compatibility.
Adding this code right after the autocomplete in your script will push the annoying helper off the page, but the people using screen readers will still benefit from it:
$(document).ready(function() { //pushing the autocomplete helper out of the visible page
$(".ui-helper-hidden-accessible").css({"position": "absolute", "left":"-999em"}) //{"display","none"} will remove the element from the page
});
I'm not a fan of manipulating CSS with JS but in this case I think it makes sense. The JS code created the problem in the first place, and the problem will be solved a few lines below in the same file. IMO this is better than solving the problem in a separate CSS file which might be edited by other people who don't know why the .ui-helper-hidden-accessible class was modified that way.