1308315 - NVDA doesn't focus visually hidden div in FF ESR

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Core :: Disability Access APIs, defect)

Description

[emily.seitz]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; WOW64; rv:45.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/45.0
Build ID: 20160905130425

Steps to reproduce:

Firefox ESR
0. Open NVDA
1. Open this page in Firefox ESR: http://jsfiddle.net/ecslee/e06ptdr4/6/
2. Tab to the link that says it will show a popup
3. Press enter - notice a popup opens and NVDA announces the contents
4. Press arrow down - notice the popup closes and NVDA does not read the contents

Firefox 49
0. Open NVDA
1. Open the page in FF 49
2. Tab to the link that says it will show a popup
3. Press enter - notice a popup opens and NVDA announces the contents
4. Press arrow down - notice the popup remains open and NVDA announces the contents again

Background info:
In our page, we use popups to display extra information above the text when a link is clicked.  These popups are inserted at the end of the dom, so they are not accessible.  As a result, we include a "shadow popup" within the link that is visually hidden and contains the same text as the popup.  When the real popup is opened, the shadow popup is changed to aria-hidden=false so that the screen reader can access it via arrow-down.  When we notice that focus moves to the shadow popup, we keep the real popup open and shadow aria-hidden=false.  Once we get an event that focus is neither on the link nor the shadow popup, we hide the visible popup and set the shadow to aria-hidden=true.

In Firefox 49 and Chrome, this approach works.  In Firefox ESR, however, arrow-down moves focus to the body instead of the shadow content.


Actual results:

In Firefox ESR, arrowing-down to the visually hidden div moves focus out of the popup span.  As a result, the popup focus is lost, and so the popup is hidden and its shadow is hidden from NVDA.


Expected results:

In Firefox ESR, arrowing-down to the visually hidden div should move focus to that div, remaining in the popup span.  As a result, the popup retains focus, and the contents can be read by NVDA when arrowing-down.

Comment 1

[Marco Zehe (:MarcoZ)]

Wow, there have been a lot of changes between the last ESR and Firefox 49 that could account for this. It will be very hard to find which of the changes in the accessibility code account for this to be fixed, and it might be very difficult, even impossible, to backport this to ESR, given that ESR releases usually only get critical, usually security-related, bug fixes. And the next ESR isn't too gar out IIRC, so these changes that fix the problem aren't too far away for ESR customers.

David, your thoughts?

Comment 2

[David Bolter [:davidb] (NeedInfo me for attention)]

I agree with your assessment. Hopefully the affected users will be permitted to use Firefox 49.

Comment 3

[alexander :surkov (:asurkov)]

wontfix then?