1422424 - The active alert/dialog should have STATE_ACTIVE

Status: NEW

(Core :: Disability Access APIs, defect, P3)

Description

[Joanmarie Diggs]

Steps to reproduce:
1. Launch Firefox
2. In the location bar type: javascript:alert("alert");
3. Press Return
4. Use an accessibility inspector like Accerciser to view the state of the dialog

Expected results: Because the alert dialog is the active window, it would have STATE_ACTIVE.

Actual results: The alert dialog lacks STATE_ACTIVE.

Impact: Orca cannot readily determine that the dialog should be treated as the active window.

Comment 1

[alexander :surkov (:asurkov)]

Joanie, should STATE_ACTIVE be applied to any element having ARIA role=alert or role=alertdialog or javascript:alert() is a special one?

Comment 2

[Joanmarie Diggs]

(In reply to alexander :surkov from comment #1)
> Joanie, should STATE_ACTIVE be applied to any element having ARIA role=alert
> or role=alertdialog or javascript:alert() is a special one?

The goal is to identify the window (be it an app window or a showing dialog) that the user is in. Since an ARIA alert is not a window or dialog, exposing STATE_ACTIVE for them is not needed [*]. I would say "yes" to the alertdialog role -- if we can know for a fact (or at least be pretty darned sure) that ARIA alertdialog is the active window. Can we?

We can probably take some intelligent guesses about an alertdialog. For instance, if aria-hidden="true" is on it, it's probably not active. On the other hand, if it's exposed to the user and aria-modal="true" is present, hopefully it's the active window. Things in between seem iffy to me. And maybe we need something added to ARIA -- or at least some best practices for authors -- to make any heuristic more reliable.

[*] Unless the ARIA alert happens to have a non-false value for aria-current. But for the sake of this bug, that's a different matter.

Comment 3

[alexander :surkov (:asurkov)]

If the focus is inside of alertdialog role, then we could consider it active. Would it be sufficient criteria?

Comment 4

[Joanmarie Diggs]

(In reply to alexander :surkov from comment #3)
> If the focus is inside of alertdialog role, then we could consider it
> active. Would it be sufficient criteria?

Sounds like a reasonable idea to me. :) Thanks!