1601840 - Accessibility not enabled if Orca started after Firefox

Status: NEW

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

Description

[Yudhi Satrio]

Attachment: Screenshot from 2019-12-06 08-20-24.png

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Ubuntu; Linux x86_64; rv:70.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/70.0

Steps to reproduce:

Activate orca screen reader on system settings. Then go to the Firefox browser. By default, the screen reader can't read the content. I need to go to "Preferences" first to turn on "Prevent accessibility services from accessing your browser" then restart. After the restart, I turn off it and restart again. Then the Orca screen reader works normally, can read the web content.

Note: this bug happens in Linux

Actual results:

By default, Orca screen reader can't read the web content.

Expected results:

An orca screen reader can read the web content directly without toggling the "Prevent accessibility services from accessing your browser"

Comment 1

[James Teh [:Jamie]]

(In reply to Yudhi Satrio from comment #0)

Activate orca screen reader on system settings. Then go to the Firefox browser. By default, the screen reader can't read the content. I need to go to "Preferences" first to turn on "Prevent accessibility services from accessing your browser" then restart. ...

I recently set up Firefox with Orca and did not experience this. I was able to access Firefox with Orca without changing this setting.

Was Firefox already running when you started Orca (and you just switched to Firefox) or did you start Firefox after Orca? it's possible Firefox might not enable accessibility correctly if you start Firefox before Orca; I'd need to check. Even if this is the case, just restarting Firefox should have been enough to correct this.

Comment 2

[Yudhi Satrio]

(In reply to James Teh [:Jamie] from comment #1)

(In reply to Yudhi Satrio from comment #0)

Activate orca screen reader on system settings. Then go to the Firefox browser. By default, the screen reader can't read the content. I need to go to "Preferences" first to turn on "Prevent accessibility services from accessing your browser" then restart. ...

I recently set up Firefox with Orca and did not experience this. I was able to access Firefox with Orca without changing this setting.

Was Firefox already running when you started Orca (and you just switched to Firefox) or did you start Firefox after Orca? it's possible Firefox might not enable accessibility correctly if you start Firefox before Orca; I'd need to check. Even if this is the case, just restarting Firefox should have been enough to correct this.

Hi James,

You're right. after I did your way. Just restart Firefox or turn on Orca first, the problem fixed. But I'm not sure, this is kind of bug or not.
Thank you for your feedback and sorry for just got back to you now.

Regards,
Yudhi Satrio

Comment 3

[James Teh [:Jamie]]

It's still a bug. It's just less severe.

I believe we have code which is supposed to handle dynamically enabling accessibility, but clearly it isn't.

Comment 4

[Asa Dotzler [:asa]]

Setting to access-s3 "Feature available but difficult to use."

Comment 5

[Asa Dotzler [:asa]]

Oh, oops, don't set access whiteboard on bugs in disability access components.

Comment 6

[Andy]

Still an issue on Orca 40.0 and Firefox 92.

I'm pasting some discussions from Orca gitlab here:
[BLOCKED] Firefox and Thunderbird need restart to work with Orca

AFAICT there is nothing Orca could do here; either

• Firefox would have to allow to always enable a11y support or detect it live
• or the desktop would have to make sure the property Firefox uses to detect this is always set -- this might already exist, as I don't have issues here, maybe it is the org.gnome.desktop.interface.toolkit-accessibility=true GSetting or something else, I'm not entirely sure from the top of my head.

See also:
– Bug report over at Redhat

I use Orca only for testing accessibility, maybe real Orca users would have Orca activated before any ways?

Comment 7

[Andy]

Ups, sorry I linked the wrong Redhat bug. This is the right one: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1221521

Comment 8

[Marco]

Seems to still be an issue with:

Mozilla Firefox 106.0.5
Orca 42.0

By launching first Orca and then Firefox, it seems to be working.

Comment 9

[adrien.ponchelet]

Hello,

This issue is still here :
orca -v
XKB not supported for display :0
3.38.2
firefox -v
Mozilla Firefox 115.3.1esr

Comment 10

[Andre Klapper]

Orca 3.38 is ancient and unsupported in GNOME itself; please test with recent versions. Thanks.

Comment 11

[Andy]

The comment earlier mentioned that with Orca 42 and Firefox 106 it was still an issue.

Firefox got a rework of the accessibility API with version, but I can still confirm the issue with Orca 45.1 on Gnome 45.2 and Firefox 120. Orca needs to run before starting Firefox.