1073752 - NVDA and JAWS Screen Reader Does Not Read Text Within Modal Dialogs in Firefox Version 31

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(Firefox :: Disability Access, defect)

Description

[brandi.balentine]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_9_4) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/37.0.2062.124 Safari/537.36

Steps to reproduce:

I used NVDA and JAWS screen readers to read a modal dialog with the following markup:

<div class="dialog dialog-info" data-bindattr-219="219" data-bindattr-220="220" aria-labelledby="dialog-header" data-bindattr-221="221" role="dialog" style="position: fixed; top: 50%; margin-top: -193px;">
   <div class="dialog-content">
      <div class="dialog-content-inner" tabindex="0">
         <header>
            <h2 id="dialog-header" data-bindattr-222="222">Header Text</h2>
         </header>
         <a href="#" class="dialog-link-close" data-id="close-dialog-link" title="Close dialog">
            <span id="ember2803" class="ember-view icon icon-close"></span>
         </a>
         <h3 class="ember-view" tabindex="0">Header Text</h3>
             <p  class="ember-view" tabindex="0">Paragraph Text</p>
         <h3 class="ember-view" tabindex="0">Header Text</h3>
             <p id="ember2832" class="ember-view" tabindex="0">Paragraph Text</p>
         <h3 id="ember2833" class="ember-view" tabindex="0">Header Text</h3>
         <p id="ember2834" class="ember-view" tabindex="0">Paragraph Text</p>
         <div class="button-box">
            <button type="submit" data-id="close-btn" data-bindattr-224="224" data-bindattr-225="225" data-ember-action="226">
               <span>Close</span>
            </button>
         </div>
      </div>
   </div>
</div>


Actual results:

Both screen readers skip any paragraph text within the modal dialog. This issue does not occur on other browsers such as IE or Chrome.


Expected results:

Both screen readers should read the text within the modal dialog.

Comment 1

[Marco Zehe (:MarcoZ)]

If you want the text to be read automatically when the dialog opens, you need to add an aria-desribedby attribute at the same place as where role "dialog" is, pointing to the ID or IDs that have the dialog text you want read automatically.

Comment 2

[James Teh [:Jamie]]

1. Screen readers actually shouldn't calculate the text of dialogs with role="dialog". The fact that this was being done was a bug, which has now been fixed. See https://github.com/nvaccess/nvda/issues/2390
2. As per changes in ARIA 1.1, Dialogs are now treated as documents by NVDA (unless they're inside role="application"). That means the user will be able to read the text as they would any other web document, which effectively deals with the use case here.

Closing as invalid, since this behaviour is determined by assistive technology products and not browsers. However, the above points mean that this should now work as expected anyway.

Comment 3

[James Teh [:Jamie]]

(In reply to James Teh [:Jamie] from comment #2)
> 2. As per changes in ARIA 1.1, Dialogs are now treated as documents by NVDA
> (unless they're inside role="application").

See https://github.com/nvaccess/nvda/issues/4493 for more info.

Comment 4

[Duane]

Was there ever a resolution to this for Firefox? The comments seem to indicate the issue is due to the placement of the aria-describedby attribute, or the placement of the role='application'.

The dialog title and message/body are read successfully in all other browsers I've tested: Edge, Chrome, Internet Explorer. What is it that prevents Firefox from doing the same?

Comment 5

[James Teh [:Jamie]]

With NVDA, I get exactly the same results now for this dialog in both Firefox and Chrome.

Comment 6

[Duane]

May be another issue at play in this bug.
I created a new bug for the issue I am seeing in Firefox.