1396238 - [a11y] Single tapping to change Talkback focus in page contents very often doesn't work

Status: RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

(Firefox for Android Graveyard :: General, defect, P5)

Description

[Jan Henning [:JanH]]

On native Android layouts or in Chrome, I can change the Talkback focus with a simple tap. For Gecko contents, this will fail quite frequently - I get the small feedback noise indicating that a tap has occurred, but the page content below my finger isn't focused.

Comment 1

[Nevin Chen(Not active on Bugzilla)]

Hi Wesly & Joe. Please help prioritize for Talkback. We had a lot of them now.
ni myself so I can remember to bring this up in sprint planning

Comment 2

[Wesly Huang (EPM)]

likely not for 58 even 59.

Comment 3

[Jan Henning [:JanH]]

As pointed out by bug 1423347, this does actually severely hamper usability of Firefox with Talkback.

(In reply to Jan Henning [:JanH] from comment #0)
> [...] or in Chrome, I can change the Talkback focus with
> a simple tap.

I'm not sure if I'm misremembering things, was testing with different pages with more Talkback-friendly layouts or whether Chrome actually got worse as well, but testing with https://news.ycombinator.com as suggested by bug 1423347, I'm having difficulties in focussing web content in Chrome as well now, although that's of course no excuse for us.

Comment 4

[Jan Henning [:JanH]]

And as a point of comparison, while our text selection/context menu handling can be a bit finicky as well with small text sizes, I've never had any difficulties in getting at least *some* reaction (either text selection or the context menu) to long-pressing some text.

With Talkback on the other hand, even if I look at the page and attempt to precisely target my clicks (which sort of defeats the point of Talkback, I guess) I have difficulties in getting Firefox to recognise this and focus at least *something* within the approximate area of my click.

Comment 5

[Nolan Darilek]

Is there any other information that might help to move a fix forward?

I've had to switch my default browser to Chrome, because this makes stable, beta and nightly versions of Firefox entirely unusable. As per an earlier comment, I tried pulling up https://news.ycombinator.com in Chrome and it seems to work just fine. Certain sites seem to work fine, while others are entirely unusable.

Thanks.

Comment 6

[Michael Comella (:mcomella) [NI reported issues only: ex-Mozilla]]

Snorp, with comment 5, this sounds important to Talkback users and sounds like a platform issue - do you have resources to work on this?

Eitan, can you confirm this is a critical issue to fix?

Comment 7

[James Willcox (:snorp) ([e-mail]) (he/him)]

I don't think we have resources for this currently, but maybe Eitan will be able to look at it.

Comment 8

[Eitan Isaacson [:eeejay]]

Yeah, this is not a priority atm. Working on a GeckoView a11y rewrite, and hopefully these annoyances will go away.

Comment 9

[Nolan Darilek]

(In reply to Eitan Isaacson [:eeejay] from comment #8)
> Yeah, this is not a priority atm. Working on a GeckoView a11y rewrite, and
> hopefully these annoyances will go away.

Is there an ETA on when that might land? I can certainly respect the need for a rewrite, but as a screen reader user, I miss having a non-Chrome browser choice, particularly when Firefox is my only option on Linux and I'd like to use Sync.

Thanks!

Comment 10

[Eitan Isaacson [:eeejay]]

(In reply to Nolan Darilek from comment #9)
> (In reply to Eitan Isaacson [:eeejay] from comment #8)
> > Yeah, this is not a priority atm. Working on a GeckoView a11y rewrite, and
> > hopefully these annoyances will go away.
> 
> Is there an ETA on when that might land? I can certainly respect the need
> for a rewrite, but as a screen reader user, I miss having a non-Chrome
> browser choice, particularly when Firefox is my only option on Linux and I'd
> like to use Sync.
> 
> Thanks!

Nolan,

If this is the single issue that is preventing you from using Firefox, I would definitely try fixing this sooner rather than later. Although my suspicion is that there are a whole host of issues that make our current TalkBack support unusable. I don't want to spend time on all those issues when we will have a new implementation soon. How soon? Not sure, but it is a priority for the next six months.

Comment 11

[Nolan Darilek]

So I don't know if this bug *quite* addresses the issue I had, but I didn't say anything when the original I filed was closed as a dupe. There were certainly some minor rough edges, but at some point I stopped being able to interact by touch with a large number of sites. This issue makes it seem like focus can't be set with a single-tap, and I guess that's partially true, but the issue I opened described the problem better from a full-time screen reader user's perspective, I think.

Right now, most of the sites I visit don't display *any* accessible content under TalkBack. It isn't that I can't set focus with a single-tap, though that's certainly a subset of the problem. It's that I can't get a single on-page item to speak. So, understandably, I have to switch to a browser that lets me read what's on the sites I visit. :) I'd certainly appreciate an a11y rewrite, but in the meantime I'd take a return to how things used to work if it meant some rough edges and being able to sync with Linux, as well as run ublock and other extensions that Chrome won't allow.

Thanks for your help.

Comment 12

[Firefox Bug Husbandry Bot]

Re-triaging per https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1473195

Needinfo :susheel if you think this bug should be re-triaged.

Comment 13

[BMO Automation]

We have completed our launch of our new Firefox on Android. The development of the new versions use GitHub for issue tracking. If the bug report still reproduces in a current version of [Firefox on Android nightly](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.mozilla.fenix) an issue can be reported at the [Fenix GitHub project](https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/fenix/). If you want to discuss your report please use [Mozilla's chat](https://wiki.mozilla.org/Matrix#Connect_to_Matrix) server https://chat.mozilla.org and join the [#fenix](https://chat.mozilla.org/#/room/#fenix:mozilla.org) channel.