1043387 - JAWS and NVDA screen-readers work much more poorly in TB31 compared to TB30

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(Thunderbird :: Disability Access, defect)

Description

[Dan]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:31.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/31.0 (Beta/Release)
Build ID: 20140716183446

Steps to reproduce:

In TB31, something has changed so that JAWS and NVDA screen-readers cannot access screen contents. For example, I cannot read the status bar, read the subject line of new messages, use the JAWS cursor to read the screen, etc. I have gone into the config editor and disabled layer.acceleration because hardware acceleration caused a similar problem in Firefox a few versions ago, but that doesn't seem to have helped.


Actual results:

Screen readers no longer read parts of the interface as before. Popups (such as error popups), status bar, subject line, the to-field, etc. do not read. Screen readers can still read messages and navigate the message list as before.


Expected results:

The same as in TB30 please :)

Comment 1

[Philip Chee]

CC Marco Zehe

Comment 2

[James Teh [:Jamie]]

Display hooking (which is what NVDA screen review uses) won't work with more modern ways of drawing to the screen; i.e. anything other than GDI. Screen review is definitely not the best way to access Thunderbird with NVDA.

You can access the to, subject, etc. fields either with NVDA object navigation or by shift+tabbing out of the message.

The inability to read the status bar with NVDA is bug 934875, which really does need to be fixed.

Comment 3

[Marco Zehe (:MarcoZ)]

I suggest this bug be closed invalid since we definitely will not do anything to get the old-style screen scrapers to work with TB or Firefox any more, much less in the Windows 8.1 days. The status bar bug should definitely be fixed, but for that, we first need to know how the TB status bar is being built nowadays, what markup it has etc.

Comment 4

[James Teh [:Jamie]]

Btw, bug 934874 isn't a problem for existing users, but might lead new Thunderbird users to think they can't find the from and to fields at least. This one too should really be fixed.