1621287 - Please put status bar objects in container with accessible role of status bar

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Thunderbird :: Disability Access, enhancement)

Description

[Joanmarie Diggs]

Steps to reproduce:

1. Launch Thunderbird (latest stable or Daily)
2. Use Accerciser to locate the status bar

Expected results: There would be a container with the accessible role of status bar which contains the items at the bottom of the window.

Actual results: There is no such container.

Impact: Orca's command to read the status bar fails to read the objects which function as the status bar.

According to an Orca user, this worked with version 52 of Thunderbird. I myself am not sure when this stopped working. (Nor do I have time to investigate that. Sorry!)

While Orca could get logic to try to piece together the objects which function as a status bar, it would be much nicer if there were a container with the appropriate role so that Orca could know for certain that it should present those things when the command to read the status bar is given. Thanks!

Comment 1

[Jonathan Michalon]

According to https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/appearance the -moz-appearance: statusbar CSS property was removed in Firefox 64. AFAIU the new way is to use the dedicated <statusbar> element. Changing the hbox to a statusbar indeed makes an element of "statusbar" role appear (in the devtool accessibility pane, I didn't manage to use accerciser here).

I'm inlining the test diff here, because other occurrences of this seem to lay around in Thunderbird and I don't know if a switch is in progress or how these global changes are to be handled.

diff --git a/mail/base/content/messenger.xhtml b/mail/base/content/messenger.xhtml
index 68cb81c53d..f8bdb7dc4f 100644
--- a/mail/base/content/messenger.xhtml
+++ b/mail/base/content/messenger.xhtml
@@ -922,7 +922,7 @@
       <!-- notificationbox will be added here lazily. -->
   </hbox>
   <statuspanel id="statusbar-display"/>
-  <hbox id="status-bar" class="statusbar chromeclass-status">
+  <statusbar id="status-bar" class="statusbar chromeclass-status">
 #include mainStatusbar.inc.xhtml
     <hbox id="calendar-invitations-panel"
           class="statusbarpanel"
@@ -935,6 +935,6 @@
     <label id="unreadMessageCount" class="statusbarpanel"/>
     <label id="totalMessageCount" class="statusbarpanel"/>
 #include ../../../calendar/lightning/content/calendar-status-bar.inc.xhtml
-  </hbox>
+  </statusbar>
 </window>

Comment 2

[Alex ARNAUD]

(In reply to Jonathan Michalon from comment #1)

According to https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/appearance the -moz-appearance: statusbar CSS property was removed in Firefox 64. AFAIU the new way is to use the dedicated <statusbar> element. Changing the hbox to a statusbar indeed makes an element of "statusbar" role appear (in the devtool accessibility pane, I didn't manage to use accerciser here).

I'm inlining the test diff here, because other occurrences of this seem to lay around in Thunderbird and I don't know if a switch is in progress or how these global changes are to be handled.

diff --git a/mail/base/content/messenger.xhtml b/mail/base/content/messenger.xhtml
index 68cb81c53d..f8bdb7dc4f 100644
--- a/mail/base/content/messenger.xhtml
+++ b/mail/base/content/messenger.xhtml
@@ -922,7 +922,7 @@
       <!-- notificationbox will be added here lazily. -->
   </hbox>
   <statuspanel id="statusbar-display"/>
-  <hbox id="status-bar" class="statusbar chromeclass-status">
+  <statusbar id="status-bar" class="statusbar chromeclass-status">
 #include mainStatusbar.inc.xhtml
     <hbox id="calendar-invitations-panel"
           class="statusbarpanel"
@@ -935,6 +935,6 @@
     <label id="unreadMessageCount" class="statusbarpanel"/>
     <label id="totalMessageCount" class="statusbarpanel"/>
 #include ../../../calendar/lightning/content/calendar-status-bar.inc.xhtml
-  </hbox>
+  </statusbar>
 </window>

Add Magnus to need info because he could probably tell us the way to go.

Many thanks Jo for looking at this.

Best regards.

Comment 3

[Richard Marti (:Paenglab)]

Joanmarie or Alex, could you check the Address book statusbar if it works as you want? This is the only one which has still the <statusbar> element.

Comment 4

[Jonathan Michalon]

Yes it works there (Alex confirmed and I checked later). But it seems there are other locations with that CSS property like chat or search/filter but I didn't manage to open them right now…

Comment 5

[Richard Marti (:Paenglab)]

Attachment: 1621287-hbox-to-statusbar.patch

This changes all <hbox> statusbars to <statusbar>. I leave the class to make it possible to revert if m-c decides to remove the <statusbar> element.

Comment 6

[Magnus Melin [:mkmelin]]

For reference, statusbar was removed in bug 1419170. It would be a bit odd to add it since it's not a thing now...

I wonder if adding role="status" would fix this?

Comment 7

[Richard Marti (:Paenglab)]

M-C has still one in a test: https://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/source/accessible/tests/mochitest/role/test_general.xhtml#57

The binding was removed but the element seems still to work.

Comment 8

[Alex ARNAUD]

I let Jonathan check the Magnus proposal. We work together and I've explained to Jonathan how to check if it is fixed with Orca.

Comment 9

[Jonathan Michalon]

AFAIU from https://hg.mozilla.org/integration/mozilla-inbound/rev/38f11a0d4111 they removed some sort of "manual" binding of xul:statusbar but still in the same commit, add a XULMAP and a constructor. Looks more like tid'up? This would mean that the element way is the way to go instead of CSS class or explicit role or whatever.

I wanted to test quickly on 68.5 but in the meantime there was a switch from xul files to xhtml… maybe related to the switch to distinct elements. About role I didn't see a change in the accessibility pane of dev tool but at the same time I didn't find the role in the inspector so maybe I did a mistake…

Comment 10

[Alex ARNAUD]

I don't know for Thunderbird 68 but with Daily I confirm that adding the role status on the statusbar works.

Comment 11

[Richard Marti (:Paenglab)]

Attachment: 1621287-hbox-to-statusbar.patch

This time with the role="status".

Comment 12

[Magnus Melin [:mkmelin]]

Comment on attachment 9132899 [details] [diff] [review]
1621287-hbox-to-statusbar.patch

Review of attachment 9132899 [details] [diff] [review]:
-----------------------------------------------------------------

Thanks!! Good that we could avoid adding a basically defunct <statusbar> since at some point it would need to be converted to something else.

Comment 13

[Richard Marti (:Paenglab)]

Attachment: 1621287-hbox-to-statusbar-ESR.patch

Comment 14

[Pulsebot]

Pushed by [e-mail]:
https://hg.mozilla.org/comm-central/rev/ef40d5b3cb73
Use on the <hbox> statusbar role="status" to make it accessible. r=mkmelin

Comment 15

[Rob Lemley [:rjl]]

Thunderbird 75.0b2:
https://hg.mozilla.org/releases/comm-beta/rev/6e432fce3e4c

Comment 16

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

Comment on attachment 9132981 [details] [diff] [review]
1621287-hbox-to-statusbar-ESR.patch

Approved for ESR

Comment 17

[Magnus Melin [:mkmelin]]

Thunderbird 68.7: https://hg.mozilla.org/releases/comm-esr68/rev/40ad5a91482eb2692c72057d9fa8a935103d3989